9. Hours of work

Key changes and developments since last year

• public services union UNISON has welcomed a Supreme Court decision to grant permission for an appeal against a Court of Appeal judgement affecting care workers on sleep-in shifts;

• the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has held that employers must keep records of actual hours worked in order to comply with the Working Time Directive;

• the Court of Appeal has reversed an Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) decision and ruled that an uninterrupted break of 20 minutes is not necessary in a case brought by a railway signalman against Network Rail;

• another recent ECJ case found that foster parents can be “workers” for the purposes of the Directive, although in this particular case, their work did not fall within its scope;

• the UNISON-backed case, Flowers & Ors v East of England Ambulance Trust [2018] UKEAT/0235/17/JOJ, confirms that voluntary overtime payments should be included in the holiday pay of NHS staff employed under Agenda for Change and there is also a right to back pay;

• the ECJ has ruled that the heirs of a deceased worker can claim an allowance in lieu of the paid annual leave not taken from the worker's former employer;

• new research on night shift work and breast cancer has been published.