Summertime is in full swing. This is the time when we look ahead to the upcoming collective labor agreement negotiations for professional freight transport. In a series of small articles we poll your opinion on certain topics. Did you miss the previous topics or do you want to read them again? Click here!
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Staff break?
Breaks must real are breaks in which the employee/driver can relax. Fictitious breaks should never be substituted for this. And if we all make agreements in the collective labor agreement and these prove not to work in practice, then that should be negotiable. After all, this is about safety.
Shift breaks do not work in real-life situations. Loading and unloading locations are time-bound. As a result, a driver is often unable to park his car for 2 hours. A day has 24 hours and you are required to have at least 9 consecutive hours of rest. So you would have a maximum of 15 hours of working time. But you will not be paid for 2 hours of this because you are deemed to have enjoyed graduated breaks (as stated in Appendix III of the collective labor agreement).
De Unie finds it very difficult to see these 2 hours as a “break”. Aren't these 2 hours just working time?! According to Van Dale (the Dutch Dictionary), a break is a period of rest during an activity. You should then be able to leave things alone for a while and take a break or do something else, for example, do some shopping somewhere during your break. If that is not possible, because you have to be on continuous standby, then there is no pause. According to De Unie these hours must therefore be regarded as service time and must therefore also be paid.
Shift breaks must be made between the start of work and the end of work. The loading and unloading times used by companies will have to be respected. When a driver is not able to take a graduated break, we see in practice that an employer still sees this time as a break and deducts it from the hours worked and therefore does not pay it. De Unie wants Article 26a paragraph 2.a. will be adjusted and the words “less the break times in accordance with the graduated scale included in appendix III” will be deleted.
Contact
Edith Weger, collective labor agreement negotiator of the Union takes heh heh step about this step along through it process around de collective labor agreement negotiations. The coming weeks Worden introduce discussed. Do you want react? Click here for you reaction te give. Get started september is there on the entered comments responded.
