Direct Request (CEACR) - adopted 2013, published 103rd ILC session (2014)

Forty-Hour Week Convention, 1935 (No. 47) - Lithuania (Ratification: 1994)

Article 1 of the Convention. The principle of the 40-hour week. Further to its previous comment, the Committee notes the Government’s statement that it plans to revise the Labour Code, and in that context, Government Resolution No. 587 of 2003 on the list of activities where working time duration up to 24 hours may be applied will be modified, and another provision limiting the period of being on duty up to 16 hours will be introduced. In this regard, the Committee wishes to draw the Government’s attention to the fact that the new draft Labour Code should not authorize practices that would possibly lead to unreasonably long hours of work and would thus directly contradict the principle of progressive reduction of hours of work. The Committee recalls, in this respect, Paragraph 12 of the Reduction of Hours of Work Recommendation, 1962 (No. 116), which indicates that averaging should be permitted only when special conditions in certain branches of activity or technical needs justify it. It also recalls paragraph 79 of its General Survey of 1984 on working time in which it pointed out that undue facilitation of overtime, for example, by not limiting the circumstances in which it may be permitted or by allowing relatively high maximums, could in the most egregious cases tend to defeat the Recommendation’s objective of a social standard of a 40-hour week and make irrelevant the provisions as to normal working hours. The Committee therefore requests the Government to keep the Office informed of any further developments in the process of revision of the Labour Code, and to transmit a copy of the new legislation once it has been adopted.