The average travel time to work in the United States is 25.4 minutes. From my neighborhood, it’s more like 29.9 minutes. That’s 5 hours a week of commuting just to get back and forth to work. (My weekly work commute is more like 6 hours.)
The European Court of Justice [ht: ja] has just ruled that time spent traveling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time.
This time has not previously been considered as work by many employers.
It means firms including those employing care workers, gas fitters and sales reps may be in breach of EU working time regulations.
BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman said it could have a “huge effect”.
“Employers may have to organise work schedules to ensure workers’ first and last appointments are close to their homes,” he added.
Maybe it’s time to recognize that the commuting time for all workers—with and without a fixed office or place of employment—is actually working time.
occasional links & commentary 
An aside: Despite what the BBC says, the court is now the Court of Justice of the European Union
Click to access cp150099en.pdf
In my experience ,it is customary that language teachers in Europe are not paid for time spent preparing lessons or making copies. I spent a year in Vienna teaching English, and I commuted on the U-bahn, going from one part of the city to another, providing language practice to professionals in their workplaces. Vienna’s public transport is (I gather) as good as it gets, but it became an instrument of torture during that year. It doesn’t feel so efficient if you are running from lesson to lesson, or from a lesson to somewhere to grab a quick bite to eat. Riding the U-bahn is no pleasure if your first lesson was at seven in the morning and your last lesson finished at six in the evening–and you had gaps in between, gaps which were just short enough that you couldn’t really go home and relax.
The greatest joke about all of this is the following: For the past nineteen years, I’ve had jobs which (I told myself) were just something to keep me going until a really good job came along. And a really good job has not come along. Crisis? My Crisis started a very long time ago. And I fear for my own future.
Yeah, we should be paid for commuting. And language teachers should be paid for preparation time.
And the category of ‘free-lancer’ (as in freelance language teacher) should either not exist or not be used as a way to denying someone a decent standard of living. I might also add that the teaching of so-called “Business English” should be recognized for what it is: the most cruel and vicious form of Capitalist brain-washing.
Damn! I hope this is really anonymous.
My description of the teaching of Business English as ”cruel” is not mere hyperbole. One textbook that I have used (published by a major and ancient university in the English-speaking world) features a brief account of the history of the past fifty years, a description of the way businesses moved from the UK to Asia. And we have the neat picture of jobs moving from factories to sandwich shops. But, that’s not all. We are also given a sort of case study of a stubborn man who used to work in a factory, but now is too inflexible to consider work in the service industry. We are encouraged to find fault with his misguided macho-ism.
The text does not discuss the question whether working in a sandwich shop provides a financial reward equivalent to the factory job.
However, apart from the inevitability suggested by the text, there is an explicit statement that we shouldn’t expect to have job security. The reader should be willing to move from job to job. (And nothing is said about whether one ever moves to a better job.)
There’s lots one could say about this blatant propaganda. However, my take on it is this: this textbook is telling my young students that the loss of –only relatively, and by comparison–jobs is inevitable. And, it is telling them that there is nothing they can do to change it. As I think of it now, that seems both cynical and manipulative. And, it is, as well, cruel to announce to a young person that his or her life-chances have been amputated even before they have started. (Of course, as the textbook author is educated, the actual statements contain the necessary qualifying words which prevent one from saying they are literally false, as in for most of us, a job for life is no longer realistic…..
There are teachers of English who are aware of these problems, and they have even authored volumes discussing the problem. But, there is a class structure within academia. Academics at the University of London have more resources to deal with this struggle than do I. And, I suspect they don’t fear for their own lives in quite the way that I do.
deleted ‘good’ above in the sentence: the loss of …… jobs