Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-20-Speech-1-064"
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"en.20081020.13.1-064"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen – I hope that the Council Presidency is going to join us – it has now been more than six years since the adoption of the Directive on temporary work was postponed, not because of Parliament, which gave its opinion as soon as the Commission's proposal was referred to it in 2002, but precisely because of the deadlock of certain Member States within the Council.
A debate has taken place within the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs concerning Parliament's initial proposal to amend the Commission's proposal to add elements relating to health, safety and hygiene at work, which have not been adopted by the Council. However, these guarantees exist under the terms of another directive, the Council Directive of 25 June 1991, which supplements the measures to encourage improvements in the health and safety at work of workers with a fixed-duration employment relationship or a temporary employment relationship.
As you know, ladies and gentlemen – I am going to end this first speech on this point – the European Trade Union Confederation, on the one hand, and the professional bodies representing temporary employment agencies, on the other, want us to adopt this legislation. Adopting this legislation today means ensuring that the European Parliament's positions at first reading henceforth become the law; that this framework for protecting temporary workers can be transposed within the next three years; and that the Pandora's box of uncertain negotiations within the Council cannot be reopened. That is why the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs decided on 7 October to recommend the adoption of the common position, without amendment, in order to protect this, the most insecure employment sector in Europe.
We have the opportunity today, after the adoption of a common position between the Member States, to arrive at this important piece of social legislation at a time when expectations of a social Europe are high, and it is this opportunity that we must seize. Temporary work accounts for more than three million jobs in the Union. Temporary workers are employed by around 20 000 companies, which represent a turnover of EUR 75 billion.
This is a sector that is obviously very liable to fluctuations in growth, and temporary workers are today the first to be affected by the economic slowdown and the rise in unemployment. However, like other types of insecure and atypical employment, temporary work has seen structural growth over the last few years, and this development was estimated at almost 60% over the last five years. It is a development that has continued with particular intensity within the new Member States.
Temporary work concerns a very large number of sectors that vary according to the Member State: industry, in some countries, services, in others, and construction, agriculture and transport, in others still. Its proportion also varies a great deal from one country to another. It may be as much as 5% of all workers in countries such as the United Kingdom. The duration of assignments also varies. In some countries it is short, with assignments lasting around 10 days, in France, for example; less than a week, in Spain; or around 20 days in Finland. However, in other countries, such as Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands, it may be several months, indeed even a year or more in Austria.
Temporary workers, as we know, are more exposed to physical risks, intensity of work and accidents at work. Their training is often less extensive. Stress linked to the insecurity of their jobs is also extremely common.
The fact is, the laws and the types of legal framework relating to their situation differ greatly within the Member States – so much so that temporary workers are, for example, truly protected by equal treatment, in particular in terms of pay, in just 10 of the 27 countries of the European Union. Their access to training, social protection, maternity leave – these subjects all vary and are absolutely not guaranteed in the same way in all the Member States.
That is why the European Commission, at the request of the social partners, and with the support of the European Parliament, wanted a piece of legislation that could guarantee such equal treatment. Having received an initial draft, in November 2002 the European Parliament, following on from the report by my fellow Member, Mrs van den Burg, who is still here in this House and to whom I should like to pay tribute, strengthened this draft legislation by making it possible to guarantee equal treatment from day one, in particular regarding pay.
When its common position was adopted last June, the Council eventually came round to the European Parliament's position. It therefore believed that equal treatment from day one should be the general rule and that any derogation from this principle needed to be agreed on by the social partners by means of collective negotiations or through agreements concluded with the social partners at national level. The European Parliament's amendments on the definition of the basic working and employment conditions, in particular with the inclusion of pay in Article 3, have also been incorporated in the common position.
Lastly, the Council's common position has retained the amendments on access to employment, collective facilities and vocational training, and on the right of temporary workers to be represented under the same conditions as those of permanent workers employed by the user enterprise."@en1
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