Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-10-Speech-2-067"
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"en.20050510.4.2-067"2
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"As Members of the European Parliament, it is for us to assume the responsibility for ensuring that the people of Europe have the chance of a good future. This also involves our protecting their rights as employees and their rights in the workplace. For this, there must be rules; yes, indeed, but what rules? How many and how detailed must they be? The fundamental task must surely be – or so I have heard in this House over and over again in the course of the past year – that we give priority to enabling them to keep their jobs or to enabling them to have jobs in the first place.
We have now been presented with a Working Time Directive that committees of this House have considered – and made worse, not least in terms of the criteria of the Lisbon strategy. The whole thing boils down to us making more regulations. Rather than reducing regulation and becoming more flexible, we will end up with the very opposite.
Let me illustrate that by a couple of questions. Firstly, why is it that we, in Europe, have to specify what it means to be on call? Must it mean the same thing in every hospital in every town in every country in Europe? And, if so, why? It is a fact, though, that there is a difference between what goes on in an accident and emergency department, where people often have to go out in the middle of the night, and the situation in an orthopaedic ward, where, at night, everyone is asleep! It is not acceptable – it is quite wrong – for these things to be tied to some sort of Procrustes’ bed!
Secondly, why can the extension of working time be governed only by a collective agreement? Why can an individual employee not conclude an agreement for himself? Who, in fact, gives us the right to forbid workers to come to agreements for themselves concerning their jobs and the hours that they work? I know young doctors who would be perfectly willing to work a bit longer in future and to earn a bit more, because they are starting out on life or have just become property-owners. Do we, in future, seriously want to prohibit them from doing that? And what right do we have to do so?
Why, too, do we now also want to prescribe in minute detail the hours that family members may work? Why do we want to prevent family firms from being, in future, as flexible as they always have been in the past? Different work situations call for different solutions, and if we do not enable people to find them, we will be doing people an injustice and Europe a disservice."@en1
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