The latest decision of the Supreme Court tackles the question of interpreting the requirements of eligibility for shift allowance. Spoiler alert: it ruled in favour of the employees.
Firstly, let’s take at a look at what is shift allowance exactly. According to the Hungarian Labour Code, shift allowance is a wage supplement which is given for the work performed between 6 pm and 6 am provided the beginning of the employee’s scheduled work time changes regularly. Change of the beginning of the work time is considered regularly if monthly, the beginning of one third of daily shift according to the schedule is different from the other days, and the time difference between the earliest and latest beginning is at least four hours.
The court of first instance ruled that there is a difference in one third of the working days if the beginning of two third of the working days is standard or if it is standard in one third of the working days and differs on the others. The court of first instance stated that the four-hour time difference shall stand at least for one third of the working days. In the actual case only one of the conditions occurred, namely that in one third of the working days the scheduled beginning of the shift was different. It ruled that employees did not have the right to receive shift allowance because the other condition was not met, i.e. the four-hour difference was met in less than one third of the working days of the month.
The Supreme Court, however, reached a different conclusion. In their view, the change of beginning of worktime is regular when it is different at least on one third of the days in a month and there is a four-hour difference between the earliest and the latest beginning of worktime. Nonetheless, according to the Supreme Court, this latter condition shall be examined on each and every working day of the month but the number of working days with the four-hour difference is irrelevant.