Working time for seasonal workers – two duties, one entry

The Working Time Act (ArbZG) sets limits: it governs how long someone may work at a stretch, what rest periods have to lie in between, and how breaks count. It is a protective law and applies regardless of how someone is employed.

Alongside it stands a separate recording duty, which comes from German minimum-wage law. It doesn't prescribe how long someone may work – it requires that the start, end and duration of each day's working time be recorded and kept on file. In Germany, this duty doesn't catch every job: it depends on the type of employment and on certain sectors of the economy.

That's exactly why, for seasonal workers, the type of employment is never just a payroll question. In Germany, it also decides whether the separate recording duty applies at all. Which forms and sectors that covers in detail is set out in the law and by the responsible authority – both are linked below, and it's worth checking for your own case rather than guessing.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable: satisfying one duty doesn't satisfy the other. Keeping to the rest periods doesn't record anything. Keeping a clean record doesn't observe any limit. Both have to be right, and in the end it's the record that provides the proof.

A record is tied to a person and a day. For every employee and every working day, it must show when work started, when it ended and how long it lasted – and wherever breaks fall, they belong in it too, because they are what separates working time from rest time.

This is why a weekly total is not a record. A total says how much gets paid. It says nothing about whether a limit was exceeded or a rest period cut short on any single day – and that is exactly the question an inspection asks. A total can't be worked back into a day.

A record that only reflects the planned schedule doesn't hold up either. A planned shift is a plan, not proof. What has to be proven is what actually happened – and in seasonal work, the gap between the two is the rule, not the exception.

A handwritten list isn't vulnerable because it's on paper, but because it's usually reconstructed afterwards. At the end of the week, someone pieces together roughly who was there and when. The result can add up correctly and still be no proof, because it isn't a record of the working time – it's a memory of it.

With a crew, this error scales with headcount. Reconstructing for two casual workers is a memory problem. Doing it for an entire harvest crew is a systemic one – and the moment a single person remembers something different from what's on the list, the whole record is in question.

The second weak point is attribution. If it isn't clear who made an entry, there is also no way to establish whether it was made promptly. In a dispute, a record that can't be dated is the weaker position – regardless of whether its content is accurate.

The countermeasure is unspectacular: record promptly, per person and day, right where the work starts and ends. Everything else is after-the-fact reconstruction, and reconstruction is exactly what an inspection spots first.

The record is the proof if there's an inspection. Without it, the burden of proof flips: the authority doesn't have to show that someone worked too long – the farm can't show that they didn't. That is the real reason the recording duty is set up as a duty in its own right, and not as a byproduct of payroll.

At the same time, it's the basis for payroll, not something done after the fact for it. Keeping it because payroll has to be run means keeping it too late. Keeping it while the work happens means payroll comes for free – and the proof exists without having to be produced separately.

And finally, occupational safety itself rides on it. Rest periods and maximum limits aren't bureaucracy – they're the answer to accident risks that peak exactly during harvest. A record created daily makes a breach visible while there's still time to do something about it.