Are there changes in store when it comes to keeping track of employees work time?

The Labour and Social Security Registers Act (Uradni list št. 40/06, ZEPDSV) requires employers to keep several records, including a record time worked by employees. The record of time worked must be properly completed and maintained for every employee. Of late, the Labour Inspectorate (IRSD) has stepped up the number of inspections of this particular record, which has seen a high number of violations recorded. 

In practice, employers often quit keeping these records or fail to keep them properly. Employers have been known at times to falsify records of time worked to ensure compliance when inspected. The IRSD reported on this practice for several years. The IRSD usually fines, without preliminary warning, employers found in breach of their duty to keep proper records. 

Owing to the plethora of breaches for failure to keep proper time-worked records, the IRSD had already demanded an amendment to the ZEPDSV to make it mandatory for employers to record the daily work start and finish time for each employee since employers otherwise have too many avenues open to them to violate employees’ fundamental rights regarding working time and rest. 

Complying with working time and rest provisions is crucial not only because they allow employees time to reinvigorate themselves, but also because it boosts employee work efficiency, the long-term preservation of his work ability, and for reasons of occupational safety and health, which is why the issue of recording employee working time has been a key topic of discussion across the European Union for the past several years.   

In keeping with this, the Court of Justice of the European Union rendered judgment No. C-55/18 on 14 May 14 2019 in which it ruled that the member states of the EU who have not done so already, must task employers with the obligation to establish an objective, reliable and employee-accessible system in which every employee will record their own working time and with which the employees will be ensured a better protection of the safety and health at work and compliance with general provisions regarding working time and rest. Without a system that enables the recording of daily working time, it is impossible to objectively and reliably determine either the number of hours worked (and the work schedule), or the number of overtime hours, which makes it difficult, in practice even impossible, to ensure that employees are able to exercise their rights.

If changes will take hold in Slovenia in the wake of the CEU judgment, employers who have not been using such a system (on the basis of which it is possible to accurately determine the use of working time for every employee, amount of overtime etc.), will be required to introduce it. For employers who have already been using, for example, the so-called »stamping« system, there will be no major changes. 

In order to avoid the fines which range between EUR 1,300 and EUR 4,200, we advise employers to always (i) keep records of labour and social security related matters, (ii) record regularly and promptly, on a daily basis, all pertinent information (the number of working hours for each employee for every single day, number of overtime hours, the number of night-shift hours, total number of working hours, etc.) and (iii) to keep these records properly.