Your customer offers a Sunday shutdown in Forbach, Strasbourg or Mulhouse. The machinery will be available, the technicians can travel and the customer wants production to restart on Monday. Before accepting that window, the employer must establish which rules allow its employees to do the proposed work.
Moselle, Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin have a local Sunday and public-holiday regime. A maintenance operation, an installation project and a shop opening can follow different routes. The useful first decision is whether the work fits an existing exception, needs an administrative authorisation or should move to another date.
This guide concerns adult employees undertaking industrial, building or civil-engineering work. For foreign employers, French posting rules include working time, compensatory rest and public holidays: a short assignment does not provide a general exemption from those protections. Article L.1262-4.
Identify the site and the work before choosing a procedure
The local chapter applies in Moselle, Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin. It does not cover the whole Grand Est region. L.3134-1 excludes specified activities, including agriculture, fishing and certain professional, medical and educational activities. L.3134-10 also provides a different treatment for hospitality, entertainment and transport, restricted to work that cannot be postponed or interrupted because of the activity’s nature.
Industrial establishments and building and civil-engineering sites are expressly covered by L.3134-3. Describe the contractor’s actual tasks, rather than selecting a route solely from the customer’s business name. Working inside a shop does not automatically give an installation team the shop’s permission to trade.
Under L.3134-2, employing staff in industrial, commercial or craft businesses on Sundays and public holidays is prohibited except in the cases provided by the local chapter. The customer’s site-access approval and the employer’s posting formalities answer different questions; neither establishes the Sunday basis.
Check whether the maintenance exception actually fits
L.3134-5 permits specified work without the temporary authorisation discussed below. Its maintenance provision covers cleaning and maintenance necessary for the regular operation of the establishment itself or another establishment, and work needed to resume full activity on working days, where those tasks cannot be performed on a working day.
That wording matters for an external maintenance company. The employer should explain what must be maintained, why the operation is necessary and why it cannot be carried out on a working day. A planned operation is not excluded merely because it was foreseeable; this exception has different conditions from the unforeseeable-need procedure.
Conversely, calling a new installation “maintenance” does not settle the issue. Separate essential restoration or maintenance from improvements, additional capacity and other tasks added to the shutdown. Each part needs an appropriate basis.
Other cases in L.3134-5 include work requiring immediate execution because of serious necessity or the public interest, and specified protection of raw materials or production in progress. These are factual tests, not interchangeable labels for a late project.
The exception also carries obligations. R.3134-1 requires a register for work under L.3134-5, recording each Sunday or public holiday, employee numbers, working duration and the nature of the tasks, available to the local police authority and labour inspectorate.
For the maintenance and production-preservation cases in points 3 and 4 of L.3134-5, work lasting more than three hours or preventing attendance at religious services triggers specified Sunday rest arrangements: either 36 full hours every third Sunday or release from at least 06:00 to 18:00 every second Sunday. The article provides a separate administrative exception to those arrangements under conditions. An ordinary weekday off should therefore not be treated as automatically satisfying every local rest requirement.
Use the prefectural route for an unforeseeable need
L.3134-8 allows temporary exceptions where Sunday or public-holiday employment becomes necessary unforeseeably to avoid disproportionate harm. R.3134-3 identifies the prefect as the competent authority.
Build the explanation around what changed, when it became known, the harm that would follow without the intervention and why the proposed work is a proportionate response. Technical reports, the sequence of events and realistic alternatives are more useful than a statement that the customer prefers Sunday.
A previously agreed completion date, extra cost or a production restart does not by itself establish every statutory condition. If the circumstances do not fit this route or another applicable basis, retain a workable alternative instead of promising retrospective approval.
In Moselle, the prefecture directs industrial employers to an online application for Sunday and public-holiday exceptions. Its scope includes building and civil-engineering sites. The departmental instructions, updated on 30 March 2026, require a reasoned request at least 15 working days — jours ouvrés — before the requested work, or 5 working days for duly justified urgency. They state that later requests will not be processed.
Those are Moselle submission requirements, not a guaranteed decision time or permission to start when the interval expires. Do not transfer them automatically to Bas-Rhin or Haut-Rhin. Establish the receiving prefectural service, current submission arrangements and calendar for each site before fixing mobilisation. A receipt alone does not establish an authorisation; any reliance on an implied decision requires a separate check of the exact applicable rules and file history.
Keep recurring industrial work and commerce separate
Some general provisions remain applicable locally. L.3134-1 expressly preserves the rules on continuous industrial work and relief teams in L.3132-14 to L.3132-19. These concern a defined organisation of work and can involve an applicable collective agreement or a separate inspector-led procedure. Under R.3132-13, the employer’s application includes supporting reasons and the relevant union and CSE opinions, with a decision period of 30 days from receipt. This is not the deadline for the L.3134-8 prefectural request.
Local category-based exceptions also exist under L.3134-6 and L.3134-7. Identify the actual provision or decision covering the activity; an industrial customer operating every Sunday does not automatically cover the contractor’s employees or additional tasks.
Commerce follows L.3134-4 and local rules that can restrict or prohibit employment. Its five-hour wording is not a free-standing right for every shop to open. Nor should the general-law “mayor’s Sundays” or L.3132-20 application simply be imported into the local industrial case. The general French worksite Sunday guide helps distinguish the wider routes when a project includes sites elsewhere in France.
Put the local holidays into the project calendar
L.3134-13 lists holidays that are non-working days under the local regime, subject to applicable exceptions. They include 26 December, in addition to Christmas Day, and Good Friday in communes with a Protestant church or a mixed-use church. Check the actual commune; do not describe Good Friday as an unconditional industrial holiday everywhere in all three departments.
Moselle has a separate power to regulate commercial opening on Good Friday uniformly across the department under L.3134-14. That commercial rule should not be used as a substitute for assessing the industrial intervention.
Adjacent holidays also affect rest. Subject to applicable exceptions, L.3134-3 specifies 24 hours for each Sunday or public holiday, 36 hours for a Sunday and public holiday falling on consecutive days, and 48 hours for Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. The article also fixes rules about when rest begins and ends, including a specific provision for regular day-and-night shifts. Read those rules together and check the whole calendar; the figures alone do not establish a permissible restart time.
Test the shutdown with the employee’s full week
Consider an illustrative maintenance visit near Forbach on an ordinary Sunday, with no adjacent public holiday. The proposed work is 08:00–17:00 with a genuine non-working break from 12:00–13:00: eight hours of actual work within a nine-hour span.
If each technician has already worked eight hours on each of Monday to Friday, adding Sunday produces 48 hours over six working days. With no work after Friday at 17:00 or on Saturday, the interval before Sunday at 08:00 is 39 hours. Sunday at 17:00 to Monday at 08:00 gives 15 hours.
These calculations help test the proposal; they do not authorise it. The employer still needs the Sunday basis, the local Sunday-rest cycle where applicable, and checks on the rolling average, daily limits and the following week’s schedule. General weekly rest normally combines 24 consecutive hours with daily rest, normally 11 hours, under L.3132-2 and L.3131-1.
If a technician monitors the equipment during the meal, or performs another task after the stated finish, recalculate the actual work and rest. Moving the intervention into the night also requires a separate assessment: the night-work guide explains the starting questions.
Prepare evidence that follows the chosen route
A practical preparation file should connect:
- The employer and sites: legal employer, authorised signatory or representative, exact addresses, customer contacts and employees concerned.
- The work and legal basis: task descriptions, applicable agreements or decisions, and why the selected exception covers these employees and operations.
- The reason and alternatives: technical necessity, events and dates, consequences of postponement and options considered.
- The individual calendar: requested Sundays and holidays, actual hours, genuine breaks, surrounding working days and rest arrangements.
- Consultation and evidence of the outcome: the opinions or information required for the actual procedure, application, correspondence and decision, or the records supporting an exception of right.
This is a preparation framework, not a universal statutory attachment list. For example, the Moselle online procedure identifies a CSE opinion among its required supporting documents in the circumstances it specifies. Assess the foreign employer’s actual consultation obligations and representation arrangements rather than substituting the customer’s approval.
For an L.3134-8 decision, R.3134-2 requires it to be available to the labour inspectorate at the workplace and communicated to employees. Translate its operational effect into the timetable and explain it to the team. Pay, premiums and compensation must also be checked under the applicable rules and agreements; there is no single Sunday premium established here for every industrial intervention.
For sites in several departments, keep a common project calendar but identify the basis, recipient and decision scope for each location. Agree how changes in dates, staff or tasks will be assessed before extending an existing arrangement.
Discuss the intervention before committing the team
Tell ALTALEO where the work will take place, what needs to be done and the dates and hours proposed. We can help organise the administrative preparation, assemble the supporting file and coordinate follow-up in French. The scope and quotation are agreed for the actual employer, sites and procedures; specialist legal assessment or appeal work is identified separately.
You do not need a complete application pack for the first conversation. The next useful step may be to establish the maintenance basis, prepare a defined request or revise the shutdown calendar before travel and customer commitments are fixed.
Discuss your Alsace-Moselle intervention and request tailored assistance from ALTALEO.
