I work as a doctor in a German hospital under municipal sponsorship. Our institution has its own collective agreement (not TV-Ärzte/VKA). This collective agreement regulates, among other things, both the recording of working hours and how overtime must be rewarded. This has worked well for my previous employers.
The hospital consists of dozens of clinics, in most of them the working hours are recorded and overtime is paid or compensated with free time.
In my clinic, however, there is no working time recording because the head physician rejects this. The corresponding intranet module is not activated for our clinic, according to the personnel department. My working time documentation on paper was not countersigned by my immediate superior ("we don't do that"). My colleagues and I are doing considerable extra work, which is neither remunerated nor compensated with free time. Often breaks are not possible due to the procedures and workload. Regularly there are violations of the rest periods stipulated in the Working Hours Act (Arbeitszeitgesetz) due to short-term changes in the duty roster.
We have regularly raised the issue with our boss (himself an employee of the hospital). He refuses to talk about the topic or freaks out. We took the problem to the works council, who spoke to our boss without any changes. The clinic (and therefore the hospital) benefits economically from the lower personnel costs in our department, our boss probably also has a contract in which the clinic profit is included in a performance-related payment.
What are my/our options to enforce our rights guaranteed by the collective agreement? Some of us have been advised to take individual legal action based on their private working time documentation, but colleagues want to be sure to complete their further training instead of being dismissed (which has already happened to other colleagues in the past).
PS: For me, quitting is not an option, I am location-bound, highly specialized and there are no job opportunities for my discipline in the wider area.