Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-02-13-Speech-1-187"
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"en.20060213.16.1-187"2
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".
Mr President, I would like to join those who have already congratulated the rapporteur. I think he has done an excellent job of work. This directive will benefit workers exposed to risks from artificial sources of optical radiation in a wide range of working environments: everything from electric arc welders to workers using advanced industrial lasers.
When I was rapporteur at first reading on this proposal well over ten years ago, the use of industrial lasers was pretty much in its infancy, but now they are very widespread and exposing workers to varying degrees of risk. It is a useful piece of legislation and again I would like to say ‘well done’ to the rapporteur.
I have to say, however, that he produced good work despite, rather than because of, the help of his own group. At one time this institution took its work on health and safety subjects very seriously, but a rather worrying trend has developed in relation to recent directives. When we dealt, for example, with the directive on vibration, we were told that we must exclude whole-body vibration because – and this was used in the tabloid press – what we were trying to do was to prevent farmers from driving their tractors for more than three or four hours even at the height of the harvest, which was nonsense. When we dealt with the noise directive we were told that we must exclude music and entertainment because what we were trying to do was to force members of orchestras to wear Mickey Mouse ear protectors and that we were about to ban the use of the bagpipes in Scotland. Again nonsense, but it grabbed the tabloid headlines.
In this proposal we have had a determined push by a number of Members in the rapporteur’s group and elsewhere to exclude a particular phenomenon from the scope of the directive. They pushed for that without realising that the risks arising from this phenomenon are clearly covered in the placing of clear obligations on employers by two earlier directives: the framework directive and the directive on temporary and mobile work sites. The phenomenon I am talking about is, of course, natural radiation.
The rapporteur made a valiant effort and we tried to help him to give legal certainty to employers when it comes to solar radiation. They are now lacking that legal certainty and still have the full implications of the framework directive and temporary mobile work sites directive to deal with. Hopefully, common sense will prevail at Member State level, as it has so far. That would mean, for example, that a travel agency in my region could quickly discount the risk for employees working indoors in its shops in the north of England, but that it had better take very seriously the risk facing its staff acting as company representatives in Mediterranean resorts throughout the summer months.
That is the difficulty now facing employers. We have not given them legal certainty. We will have a number of more difficult cases to assess for employers between those two extremes that I have given as an example. I hope that in future we can again focus on producing good, serious health and safety legislation and not on producing tabloid headlines."@en1
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