Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-04-27-Speech-3-118"
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"en.20050427.11.3-118"2
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".
Madam President, I welcome the report on the European Agency for Health and Safety at Work and I congratulate the rapporteur on work well done.
The key elements of this Agency are its research and distribution of best practice to Member States in relation to standards concerning health and safety at work. Legislation governing the health and safety of workers throughout the EU is a prime example of how the EU has made and can make a positive contribution to raising the quality of life for millions of the Union’s citizens.
But legislation is just one part of the equation; enforcing that legislation is another. Health and safety in the workplace can only be maintained where adequate monitoring is conducted at workplace level. While I am not familiar with the situation in other European countries, I know that in Ireland we do not have an adequate number of inspectors and monitors to ensure the health and safety of our own workers. A notable case in Ireland recently has been the exposure of the Turkish multinational company Gama, which has deprived workers of earnings through paying substantially below the minimum wage and endangered their health and safety by requiring a substantial number of its workers to work up to 80 hours per week. This is extremely damaging to the health and safety of those workers. In the potentially dangerous construction industry, accidents are much more likely to occur when people are required to work such long hours.
Of course, it is not just the company that has a responsibility. We have the legislation in Ireland, we have the minimum wage, but we are not properly enforcing that legislation. This is a high-profile case in Ireland at the moment, but there have been a number of cases in recent times where workers’ rights, particularly immigrant workers’ rights, have been trampled on.
Turkey is currently applying for membership of the EU and I support that move, but part of that process will have to be a requirement that major companies like Gama respect and protect workers’ rights within the EU. I believe the onus is on the Turkish Government to ensure this happens.
So, while we welcome this excellent report today, and indeed commend the work of the Agency, we all need to be vigilant in our own countries to ensure that workers’ rights are upheld. In particular, we need to be vigilant where workers are exposed to dangers and to risks and where they are less well represented by trade unions. What we are talking about here are immigrant workers, under-age workers, temporary workers, and so on.
Finally, I wish to make a comment on Amendment 7, which underlines the need for reliable information and comparative data and the need for a systematic collection of data across the Member States in the field of health and safety at work, with the support of Eurostat. We need accurate information across all 25 Member States, collected in a uniform way, so that we have good-quality, reliable and relevant information to underpin all policy decisions."@en1
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