I still haven’t quite got my head around the EU Court Judgment, which has decreed that the time taken by those who have to leave from home, to travel to the first client of the day and the time taken travelling home after leaving the final client of the day, should be taken into consideration when calculating the number of hours worked each day.

I suppose that for a salesperson who often has to drive for several hours to get to that 09:00 appointment, or finishes his or her final appointment at gone 18:00 and is a couple of hundred miles from home, it will make an enormous difference to the ‘working’ day, but with mortgages to pay, sales figures to achieve and jobs to worry about, who in their right mind is going to rock the boat by, perhaps, insisting on taking time off in lieu because they’re really doing a 90 hour week rather than the contracted 40 hours?

Then of course there are the delivery drivers and service engineers, who are already under the cosh in terms of meeting deadlines. Does the new ruling mean that we as customers will have to wait longer for goods we’ve ordered or for repairs to be carried out? And will we end up paying extra for goods and services to cover the fact that less time will be spent delivering them or for the extra hours those involved will now effectively be working? Will companies have to take on extra staff to cover?

www.curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2015-09/cp150099en.pdf has the details and if you have any views on how this will affect our industry of your business, I’d love to hear them.

Finally, our congratulations go to the three teams from our industry who’ve all completed mammoth feats of endurance to raise money for charity recently. With two of the teams taking on the Three Peaks challenge, John quipped that it won’t be long before someone will install traffic lights up there! You can read all about their efforts below and please donate if you can.

www.facebook.com/KBzine 

Yours,

Jan Hobbs