Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-05-04-Speech-1-122"
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"en.20090504.17.1-122"2
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"Madam President, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my colleagues on the negotiating team for their constructive cooperation. It is regrettable that agreement will not be reached. That is due to the situation that we have at present, which is that 15 Member States are using the opt-out. No doubt there may be a few more, and that is not a good situation.
I can also tell you that we made some progress during the negotiations. Where on-call time and time off in lieu are concerned, I consider it progress that we all said that on-call time counted as working hours. I believe we could have reached agreement there. The reason we did not reach agreement was the opt-out. On the one side was the Council, with a blocking minority that absolutely did not want to remove the opt-out, and on the other – and this is often forgotten – a large majority in the European Parliament that does very much want to get rid of the opt-out because it has nothing to do with health and safety. We Members of Parliament tried, we made a proposal that the Council itself should come up with an end date. In the end we were even willing to say: ‘We will simply set a date for further negotiations and for coming up with an end date’. The Council was not willing to accept even this. It then became impossible. It was not the case, Mr Sedláĉek, that the Council accepted all the conditions set by Parliament as regards conditions for the opt-out. When we started negotiations on the last day more or less every suggestion was rejected. I can confirm that there is actually a majority in favour of removing the opt-out. There is a large majority in Parliament and a majority on the Council, but unfortunately it is a minority on the Council that is allowed to decide that the opt-out must remain. This is unsatisfactory. I hope that the Commission will come back, that people will accept their responsibility and that the starting point for a new proposal will be what the directive is about, which is health and safety for workers, and that then the opt-out will have to be phased out."@en1
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