People work in an office of a skyscraper at the La Defense business district near Paris on October 22, 2018 | Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images All companies must record staff working hours, EU court rules The judgment requires EU countries to ensure employers set up a system to enforce workers’ rights.

Companies in the EU must set up a system to record how many hours their employees work every day, the European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday.

The judgment requires all EU member states to ensure employers establish such systems, which the court said were necessary to enforce legal limits on working hours.

In a statement, the court said that in order to guarantee employees' rights under the EU's working time directive and the charter of fundamental rights, member states "must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured."

The court added that EU member states would have to determine specific arrangements for the implementation of such systems themselves, while taking into account peculiarities of particular fields or companies where applicable.

The judgment came after the Spanish trade union CCOO requested a Madrid court to rule on whether the local branch of Germany's Deutsche Bank, which only measures overtime, had to establish a system to record employees' working hours. The Spanish court requested a ruling from the European Court of Justice.

In its statement, the Luxembourg court noted that according to data provided by the local court, 53.7 percent of Spanish employees' overtime hours were not recorded.

It added that member states were responsible for implementing the EU's working time directive, which outlines maximum working hours as well as minimum daily and weekly rest periods for employees.

Without a system to record working hours, the court said, employees could not reliably determine the length of their working hours or rest periods, making it "excessively difficult, if not impossible in practice, for workers to ensure that their rights are complied with."

The ruling could have far-reaching consequences, as modern-day working hours are currently not clearly defined. The EU court did not specify, for instance, whether quickly writing an e-mail from home would have to be recorded as work time, leaving it up to the member states to decide the specifics.

The German Employers' Association BDA criticized the judgment as being "behind the times," telling the Süddeutsche Zeitung: "We employers are against the general reintroduction of the punch clock in the 21st century."

European trade unions, meanwhile, welcomed the ruling.

"The court puts a stop to flat-rate work, and rightly so," said Annelie Buntenbach, board member of the German Trade Union Confederation DGB. "Flexibility will not suffer, on the contrary: Instead of with a punch clock, working hours can today be documented with smartphones and apps, after all."

José María Martínez, secretary-general of the CCOO, said the court's decision had given them "tools to tackle overtime fraud."

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