Workers of the German Red Cross, including Mr Pfeiffer, who served as emergency workers, doing ambulance runs claimed that a collective agreement that set their hours at 49 hours per week violated the Working Time Directive.

The Red Cross contended that as emergency workers they were akin to civil servants and thus fell outside the Directive's scope.

The Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice held that workers could not be asked to work 49 hours a week by a collective agreement.

As a starting matter it held that the exception for civil servants was not applicable, holding that ‘the civil protection service in the strict sense thus defined, at which the provision is aimed, can be clearly distinguished from the activities of emergency workers tending the injured and sick which are at issue in the main proceedings.’ The ‘worker's consent must be given not only individually but also expressly and freely’.

Since they are exceptions to the Community system for the organisation of working time put in place by Directive 93/104, the exclusions from the scope of the directive provided for in Article 1(3) must be interpreted in such a way that their scope is limited to what is strictly necessary in order to safeguard the interests which the exclusions are intended to protect (see, by analogy, the judgment in Jaeger, paragraph 89).