Doing business – Home-work transport costs: compulsory coverage regardless of geographical distance
By Justine Coret, Associate Lawyer of the Social Department – AYACHE Firm
This is how we have seen a proliferation of situations of employees choosing to establish their personal residence in the provinces while they worked in Paris, dividing their time between their home and their company.
Under the Labor Code, any employer, private or public, has the obligation to cover at least half of the price of the public transport subscription subscribed by its employees for their travel between their usual residence and their place of employment. work.
The notion of domicile or habitual residence can be difficult to determine when the employee has a dual residence (weekdays in the city where he works and weekends in the city where his family resides).
For the Court of Cassation, habitual residence is the place where the employee has established the permanent or habitual center of his interests; for the administration, it is the environment where the employee resides during the working days. Thus, an employee with a dual residence, for example during the week in Paris where he works and on weekends in Bordeaux where his family lives, must be considered as having his residence in Paris, so that only his public transport subscription between your Parisian home and your place of work gives you the right to support.
Things become complicated when employees choose to move their homes away from their workplace: the cost for the companies concerned can be high.
The question arose as to whether it was possible to refuse to partially cover the cost of an employee’s public transport subscription on the grounds that the latter’s geographical distance was linked to personal convenience.
The Paris judicial court, seized of this question in 2022, responded in the negative in a judgment of July 5, 2022, considering that the employer could not validly add a condition not provided for by law.
The Paris Court of Appeal, called upon to rule on this same judgment of the Judicial Court, confirmed this position in a judgment of September 14, 2023, and recalled without any ambiguity that the geographical distance from the employee’s home for personal convenience does not could justify a refusal to reimburse public transport costs for journeys between home and work.
In this case, the employer had established a criterion of geographical distance between the employees’ usual residence and the place of work, making partial payment of the cost of the transport ticket subscription conditional on a maximum daily journey time. home-workplace 4 hours round trip. The Court of Appeal, by deciding that transport costs must be covered without distinction between employees, regardless of their place of residence, confirmed the case law of the Court of Cassation (Cass. Soc. December 12 2012, n°11-25.089), issued on the grounds that every person must have the freedom to choose their domicile.
It remains to be seen whether the High Court will change its position to adapt its case law to an increasingly frequent reality, and prevent companies from being tempted, to control their costs in this regard, to limit teleworking or even impose a return to face-to-face work. .
Justine Scribble
Associate lawyer of the social department – AYACHE Cabinet
2023-12-15 12:09:48
#Homework #transport #costs #compulsory #coverage #geographical #distance
