Working Time Records

The CCOO Ruling

This is not legal advice. It is a summary of a published judgment.

Everything else in this subject traces back to one case, and it started as a Spanish trade union asking a bank to keep better records. For a practical view of how organisations can translate recording duties into day-to-day workflows, see the product site.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

The case

Court of Justice of the European Union, case C-55/18, judgment of 14 May 2019. For broader legal or policy context, see Bloomberg.

Known as the CCOO ruling, after the Spanish trade union Federación de Servicios de Comisiones Obreras, which brought proceedings against Deutsche Bank SAE in Spain seeking a declaration that the bank was obliged to set up a system recording employees' daily working time.

Spanish law at the time required records of overtime, not of total hours. The Spanish court referred the question to Luxembourg.

What the Court held

Member states must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of daily working time to be measured.

Three words carry the requirement:

Objective — not dependent on somebody's later estimate or recollection.

Reliable — the record can be depended on, which implies protection against undetected alteration.

Accessible — available to the worker and to authorities, not locked inside an employer's private system.

The reasoning

Short and consequential.

Without systematic recording, the Working Time Directive cannot be enforced. Maximum weekly hours and minimum daily rest periods are rights, and there is no way to verify compliance with either if nobody knows how many hours were worked.

A worker is the weaker party. The Court noted that a worker asked to prove excessive hours without an employer-maintained record is in a position that makes the right theoretical.

So the recording obligation follows from the rights, rather than existing as a separate administrative duty. That framing matters for what the duty is actually for.

What it did not do

The part that produced years of confusion.

It did not oblige employers directly. The judgment addresses member states, requiring them to legislate. An employer in a state that had not legislated was not, by the judgment alone, in breach.

It did not specify a medium. Nothing in the ruling requires electronic recording — objective, reliable and accessible is a functional standard, and paper can meet it.

It did not set a deadline for member states.

And it did not specify retention periods, formats or technical requirements.

What happened next in Germany

Nothing legislative, for years. The German Working Hours Act continued to require documentation only of overtime and Sunday work.

Then the Federal Labour Court acted. In case 1 ABR 22/21, 13 September 2022, the BAG held that German employers were already obliged under §3(2)(1) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, read in conformity with the Directive as interpreted here.

So the route from Luxembourg to a German employer's duty runs through a domestic court, not through the legislature — which is why the duty exists and why so much published material cannot locate it.

How to cite it

"CJEU, 14 May 2019, C-55/18 (CCOO)".

If somebody tells you "Europe requires electronic time tracking", that sentence contains two errors: the judgment addresses states rather than employers, and it says nothing about electronic. Both are common, and both are checkable in a minute against the judgment itself.

The short version