In its decision No. 21 Cdo 2608/2023 (hereinafter referred to as the “Decision”), the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic (hereinafter the “SC”) recently dealt with a hitherto unresolved issue, namely what are the criteria for determining the location of an employee’s regular workplace in the event that this location is not agreed between the employee and the employer or is agreed in violation of the provisions of Section 34a of Act No. 262/2006 Coll., the Labour Code (hereinafter the “Labour Code”).

In the aforementioned Decision, the case was a case where the employee concerned had agreed in his employment contract on the place of work in the South Moravian Region. It follows from the Labour Code, in particular from Section 34a, that if the place of work is wider than the territory of one municipality, the municipality in which the employee’s journeys for the purpose of work most often begin is deemed to be the regular workplace.

Since the location of the regular workplace was not agreed in the employment contract, including its amendments, on the basis of the rule contained in Section 34a of the Labour Code, the SC inferred the municipality of Breclav as the employee’s regular workplace, which was both the employee’s place of residence and the place where the employee’s regular journeys for the purpose of work as a public transport driver began.

The employer also assigned the employee to Břeclav from the beginning of the employment relationship until the summer of 2020. However, in the summer of 2020, this employee-driver was assigned to a public transport line that started and ended in Hodonín. The employee, as the plaintiff, therefore sought reimbursement of travel allowances since his transfer from his former regular workplace in Břeclav to his new workplace in Hodonín.

In the case in question, the SC concluded that, as a general rule, the location of the regular workplace, which is agreed as an optional content in the employee’s employment contract, can only be changed by amending the content of the employment contract, i.e. in the form of an amendment to the employment contract. It is not possible for the place of the regular workplace determined on the basis of the rule contained in Section 34a of the Labour Code to be changed by a unilateral instruction from the employer.

In other words, a change of the regular place of work determined on the basis of the presumption set out in Section 34a of the Labour Code (i.e., the presumption consisting in the fact that if the place of work is agreed to be wider than the territory of one municipality, the municipality, in which the employee’s journeys for the purpose of work most often begin, is deemed to be the regular place of work) can only be made by amending the content of the employment contract, i.e., by a bilateral legal negotiation, but not by a unilateral instruction of the employer.

It is thus certain that the location of the regular workplace determined on the basis of the criteria set out in Section 34a of the Labour Code can only be changed by an amendment to the employment contract of the employee concerned.