There seems to be a difference of opinion at work between what the transport manager and the rest of us say.
Our normal working days and times are monday to friday 3.30am to 11am, saturdays 1am to (depending on the run you are on) 5.30am / 6.30am.
They are on about changing our saturday work time to that of the rest of the week, 2.30am start and approx 9.30am finish. Here’s where the question comes… The supervisor says that we must have a 45 hour weekly rest break after finishing work on saturday morning until we restart on monday, however, the transport manager says that we don’t. He says we can reduce this amount of rest time we take due to the fact that we don’t actually work that many hours during the day (most people 7.5 hours, others 8 hours) so the shortfall can be added onto the daily rest periods.
I’m sure that you can’t do this but I thought I’d throw it over to you guys to see who you think is right.
My opinion is if you reduce your weekly rest period you must compensate for the reduction by the end of the 3rd week and not add the shortfall onto the daily rest periods…
i had this same problem last year and from the responses i got, you are right. the weekly rest cannot be made up during the week. it has to be made up at the weekend. your working hours are obviously not an issue so i would concentrate on keeping an eye on the NON working hours ie knock off saturday through to start monday. they must average minimum 45 hours a week
Yeti; both opinions are part way there.
After six daily driving periods or at the end of the sixth working day the driver must start a weekly rest period. This is 45 continiuous hours, before work / driving can be resumed. The period can start in one week (eg Saturday afternoon) and end in the next week (example Monday morning.
The period can be reduced to 36 hours if the driver is at home or the vehicle at base. If the driver / vehicle is away then the period can be reduced to 24 hours. BUT, an euivalent amount of time must be added to either a daily or weekly rest period before the end of the third week following the week the reduction was taken. ALSO, the equivalent rest period must be taken EN BLOC, in other words, in one go. If you reduce to 36 hours then you ‘owe’ 9 hours which must be added to a daily or weekly rest period. Similarly. if you take 24 hours, you owe 21 hours which must be taken in one go, You cannot take little chunks of extra rest and add them together and make-up the difference that way.
You can make weekly rest up during the week it doesn’t have to be a week end. A weekly rest period doesn’t have to be taken at a week end, if the rules said it had to be at the week end it would make life difficult for drivers who work every Saturday and Sunday and have there weekly rest during the week.
You can add the compensation onto a daily rest period, however weekly rest reductions must compensated for in one block and added to a daily or weekly rest period of at least 8 hours. Compensation for reduced daily rest can be taken in blocks of 1 hour.
Using the times you have given if you finish at 11:00 Saturday, instead of 06:30 as you do now, and start again at 03:30 Monday will mean a weekly rest period of 40.5 hours leaving 4.5 hours to make up.
You are having 16.5 hours daily rest most days so by the time you start work on the Tuesday morning you will have compensated for the reduced rest.
One other point the reduced rest must be compensated by the end of the fourth week, not third. If the reduced rest is at the end of week 1 it must be compensated for by the end of the third week following the reduction which would be the end of week 4.
Yeti:
Thanks for the replies guys at least thats cleared things up a bit.
On the downside, it looks like they will be able to extend our saturday working hours then
Cheers all.
Not necessarily. If you don’t want to do it you have to consider the fact that the compensation must be
granted at the request of the person concerned
which means you decide when you are going to make the compensation, not your boss. Although whether it is worth causing grief for a few extra hours work, which you must be being paid for, only you can decide.
