Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-23-Speech-2-072"

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"en.20011023.5.2-072"2
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"Mr President, the proposal for a directive which is before us for its second reading, falls within the scope of measures that aim to improve the safety and health of workers. As you know, this is an objective that Parliament quite rightly considers very important. We must, however, find a fair balance between, on the one hand, the need to protect the health and safety of workers and, on the other hand, the need to prevent this directive from placing excessive burdens on companies and particularly on small- and medium-sized enterprises. If we adopt overly restrictive exposure limit values, it could, in practice, and technically speaking, turn out to be extremely difficult to abide by them; it could actually harm the interests of workers, either because this could lead to their working time being limited to two hours per day, or because if the limit values are not applied, the protection they do have could be significantly reduced. Since this report only concerns the issue of vibrations, we must also take into account the delicate and hard-won agreement between the various national requirements, and we must not impose further excessive restrictions on the sectors and industries concerned. And in this respect, I would like to say that our Committee was not able to complete its work due to an incredibly busy timetable. We were unable to interview all the relevant people involved before the deadline, and this is something I regret. For these reasons, our group believes that the amendments adopted in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs are a relatively acceptable compromise between the requirement for the protection of workers and on the competitiveness of European industry. Nevertheless, our group considers that it is essential to include the derogation option for the agricultural and forestry sectors, since the current arrangements for servicing and replacing machinery in these sectors would not enable exposure limit values to be effectively applied. On a personal note, and particularly with regard to the work that we did last week, I would lastly like to thank Mrs Thorning-Schmidt for her cooperation. Mrs Diamantopoulou, I hope that this spirit of openness, as part of our conciliation work with the Council, will enable us to agree on a halfway point so that the directive can be adopted within a reasonable timeframe."@en1

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