Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-10-Speech-2-048"
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"en.20050510.4.2-048"2
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, my political group as a whole is absolutely opposed to the European Commission's proposal. At the same time, it is highly critical of the report approved by a majority in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs because, unfortunately, on most issues it goes along with the Commission proposal.
We reject the Commission proposal because it perpetuates opting out and strengthens social dumping. It feeds the unilateral power of the employer even more, on the pretext of corporate flexibility. It weakens the existing levels of protection of tens of millions of workers and the equilibrium within their families. It relaxes the current rules regulating working time introduced in the 1993 directive out of existence.
To be specific, the Commission proposal will allow the maximum working time to be as much as 65 hours a week, while the current directive and the International Labour Organisation Convention introduced a maximum permissible working week of 48 hours as long ago as 1919. We are turning the clock back 85 years.
In addition, the reference period for flexible working time has been extended from four to twelve months, while the necessary precondition of prior collective negotiation and agreement on the subject has been abolished. This will allow employers, in both the private and public sectors, to unilaterally and abusively manage the working time of workers, in the absence of the workers themselves, under the law or regulations. Similarly, the clear case law of the Court of Justice of the European Communities has been circumvented with the misleading device of dividing on-call time into active and inactive on-call time. Thus, the Member States or employers acting alone can say that eight inactive working hours implies 0.8 hours active time. It is a mockery.
Similarly, the Court of Justice of the European Communities has imposed a rest period immediately after on-call time. How does the Commission interpret the word 'immediately'? One day, three days, three weeks? I greatly fear that the Commission's proposal is nothing other than a knife in the back of tens of millions of workers, especially in the health and service sectors. At the same time, however, it represents a danger to the health and safety of us all.
Commissioner, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who had been on call for 30 hours? Would you want to come across a lorry driver on the road who has been driving for 30 hours without a break?"@en1
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