Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-01-15-Speech-4-096"
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"en.20090115.13.4-096"2
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"Mr President, the field of equal pay and gender equality has been perhaps the supreme example in the European Union of judicial activism, of the Treaty saying one thing and then the European Court interpreting that in an expansive and creative way.
The Treaty of Rome has one sentence on the subject which you would have thought is very easily understood: ‘Men and women shall be given equal pay for equal work’. But in a series of contentious judgments – Defrenne v. Sabena, Barber v. Guardian Royal Exchange, and others – the definition has been progressively widened, first so as to include holiday entitlements and pensions and so on, and then so as to include work of equivalent value.
It is not at all clear how an employer is supposed to assess work of equivalent value, whether he is required, for example, to factor in the availability of suitably qualified applicants. My point is not really to do with gender equality, it is to do with the fairness of Member States thinking that they have signed one Treaty, and then finding that it is interpreted in the courts by judges who give it a meaning that it could not possibly have been intended to have.
Before we open the door to massive new extensions through the Treaty of Lisbon, we should put it to a referendum.
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