You work half an hour more and the clocking system doesn’t count it. These first 30 extra minutes do not count and the company assures that, in practice, you will not need to recover them. On paper it may seem like a simple margin of courtesy, which they have added to make the daily signing easier and more comfortable for you. However, the problem arises when this margin is worked out in real time and disappears from the record.
That’s exactly what happened at Siemens Rail Automation in 2021. The company implemented the system for about 750 employees and the national court struck it down. For the court, this process could show a worker ending recovery time or redistributing his day for minutes that, according to the company, would never be needed.
Although the ruling is now five years old and the Supreme Court has introduced some nuances since then, Germany surprisingly resolved a similar case, and more detailed regulation of time registration is still pending in Spain.
How it works. In January 2021, Siemens Rail Automation implemented its new time registration system, but not before negotiating several meetings with the Works Council without reaching an agreement. Its rules included a “correction factor”, which applied to the first excess of the day to cut 30 minutes a day. That is, when a worker works eight and a half hours and is on the clock, those thirty minutes are not counted as extra.
The company explained that this margin absorbs small interruptions that are not always recorded: having a coffee, making a personal call or taking other types of small breaks that any of us can take on a daily basis during our working day. The CCOO was not satisfied and took the system to the national court, the UGT joined the case.
The contract already regulated the break. The National Court rejected the corrective factor that the signing system added, among other things, based on two elements. On the one hand, the collective agreement has already established that breaks are not considered effective working hours: 15 minutes from Monday to Friday and another 40 minutes from Monday to Thursday. The extra 30 minutes discount was not among them.
On the other hand, the work of the registry was contradictory: the system needed to record individual breaks and, at the same time, automatically subtract a generic margin that was intended to cover them.
Ruling 169/2021 of July 14 abolished this process and other aspects of the system related to international travel and overtime.
There may be room. What matters is where it comes from. This does not mean that any 30-minute window in the clocking system is invalid. In April 2022, the Supreme Court considered a factor of 30 minutes in a continuous working day valid in a different case: it agreed with the workers’ representation and did not modify what was provided in the contract.
And in 2024 the Supreme Court returned to the limits of time registration by stating that in a case concerning the 15-minute margin in clocking in time, time registration could not be used to change already recognized working conditions.
Therefore, the issue is not whether it is 15, 30 or 40 minutes. is What do these minutes represent, who agreed on them and do they really correspond to rest time or work time?.
Germany ended up reaching a very similar question. In February 2025, the German Federal Labor Court decided the case of a part-time doctor with a six-hour day. When he extended his day and didn’t register a break, the system automatically deducted half an hour.
The accumulated results were significant: 59 hours and three minutes that the worker maintained that he had actually worked. The Federal Labor Court considered that the mere automatic deduction of the system did not prove that these breaks actually existed. The company had to prove that the break had occurred. This does not mean that the court has definitely granted the full amount claimed by the doctor.
And perhaps the most interesting part of both cases is: A program can throw a break, but it cannot by itself convert a theoretical break into a break that actually occurred..
The break exists, but it’s in small print. In Spain, if a continuous working day exceeds six hours, the worker has the right to a minimum break of 15 minutes, as stated in the Workers’ Statute. This rest is considered effective working time only when it is established in the collective agreement or contract.
Recording actual breaks can be precisely one way to avoid conflicts. In the case of Siemens, for example, the obligation to record certain personal journeys was not waived. And the Ministry of Labor recommends that the system allow breaks to be marked if necessary so that what part of the time elapsed between entry and exit corresponds to actual work.
The terrain becomes much grayer when the breaks are only on paper. Eating in front of the computer while answering messages, calls or tasks doesn’t have to interrupt the day for half an hour. In those cases it is necessary to analyze what happened in practice.
What the law says and what is still missing. Article 34.9 of the Workers’ Statute obliges companies to guarantee daily recording of each worker’s working day with specific start and end times. These records must be kept for four years and be available to workers, their representatives and labor inspectors.
What does not yet exist is a general obligation to use digital systems. The royal decree intended to develop the new digital signature has not yet been approved at the beginning of October 2026, after the Council of State issued an unfavorable opinion in March. Time registration is mandatory, whether it is necessarily done through digital tools is another matter.
And partly here is the paradox of this system, They are implemented to accurately measure how much work we do in our day, but a simple automated rule can do the exact opposite and erase the time we work.
Where is my time? Pa-ga-me. If this happens to you, The first thing recommended to do is review what your collective agreement establishes regarding breaks, breaks and effective working hours. If the system automatically deducts minutes during which you have actually continued working, it is recommended to record this and consult the works council, union or labor inspectorate.
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