City of Paris: guards of social residences will not receive requested overtime

The Paris administrative court of appeal dismissed twenty-two residence guards for elderly people from the Social Action Center of the City of Paris (CASVP), who had taken legal action to have their “on-call duties” considered as “effective work” and paid as “overtime”.

They demanded between 50,000 and 434,000 euros

Dismissed in February 2023 by the Paris administrative court, the applicants turned to the Paris administrative court of appeal to claim sums between 50,000 and 434,000 euros “in compensation for the damage suffered”.

According to them, the “on-call system put in place within the CASVP” must be considered as “effective working time giving right to compensation”: housed on site for “absolute necessity of service”, they must remain “at the immediate and permanent disposal” of the city of Paris and “no travel outside the home is authorized”.

“The organization of on-call duty (…) had the effect of harming the health of the agents, in particular their psychological balance,” estimated their lawyer. “Due to the frequent nature of the requests from residents to which they were required to respond” and “the ban on leaving their homes which was imposed on them”, the guards of the CASVP residences could not in fact leave their homes “between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. This system amounted to denying their “right to respect for a normal private and family life”.

On-call duty from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m.

But, in several judgments dated February 9, 2024 which have just been made public, the Paris administrative court of appeal begins by recalling in general that the CASVP guards could not “claim payment or compensation for overtime” only if “these hours correspond to effective interventions (…) and they have the effect of causing this agent to exceed the time limits defined by the work cycle”.

However, the applicants “do not justify either the frequency or the nature of [leurs] interventions with residents which would not have given rise to payment of overtime by the CASVP,” argue the magistrates. None of them exceeds the rate of “39 hours per week” either and each “benefits (…) from a two-hour lunch break, (…) from two consecutive days of rest during the weekends” and of “annual leave”.

“The ban on leaving their homes which was imposed on them, even temporarily while waiting for them to have a mobile phone, does not in itself establish that they would have been at the permanent disposal of their employer,” consider the Parisian judges.

“The sole circumstance that the guards are forced to remain within the establishment in order to respond quickly to requests from residents is not sufficient to establish the general, continuous and absolute nature of these constraints,” concludes the administrative court of appeal of Paris.

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