Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-12-01-Speech-3-167"
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"en.19991201.13.3-167"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I should also like to congratulate the Conciliation Committee as well as Mr Pronk and all those who helped to achieve this agreement.
It is particularly significant and interesting from a political point of view that, as Mr Pronk stated, we have, for the first time since the Amsterdam Treaty, a piece of legislation addressing social issues, in particular health and safety issues, which has been passed through under the codecision procedure. The directive is extremely important and concerns workers in particularly hazardous places who are exposed to explosive atmospheres. As you know, this follows a long dialogue and extensive negotiations between the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament on this matter.
Despite it taking so long, almost four years, to achieve this result, Parliament’s insistence on certain amendments has proved to be fruitful. With reference to Mr Pronk’s report, I too should like to stress that the adoption of Amendment Nos 4 and 5 on information to undertakings and vade mecum, which I agree could be improved and made more binding – not forgetting that these amendments were accepted at second reading – just goes to show the importance of the codecision and cooperation procedures of Parliament and the Commission.
I would also like to mention the matter of the application of this directive. Of course, it is not the application of this particular directive which raises problems, but of all directives. Admittedly, the Commission’s control mechanism is not tight enough to monitor all the Member States and all the directives that are passed. Nevertheless, I did state, and this is a commitment on the part of the Commission, that every effort would be made, in collaboration with the Member States and in collaboration with all the Directorates and Commission mechanisms, to achieve the best results.
As to the question of how it will be applied to companies themselves, whether there will be problems with subcontracting and part-time employment, I should like to tie my answer in with the Commission’s other policies and measures. Thus, how undertakings are linked and how sub-contracting works is up to each Member State. Nevertheless, special training for workers and special programmes for the health and safety of workers and employers are included in the employment strategy guidelines and are funded by the European Social Fund and we also have benchmarking between countries in order to improve health and safety conditions as best we can.
In closing, I concur with Mr Skinner that we cannot merely legislate away such a serious problem as health and safety but we believe there can be constant improvement in conjunction with policies, with resources from the social funds and, of course, with the policies of Member States."@en1
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