Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-23-Speech-3-339"
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"en.20050223.20.3-339"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, what we have here is a report with an outstanding catalogue of demands, one which has been well and truly hammered out and for which Mr Maštálka deserves our congratulations and gratitude. I was amazed at the great scepticism evinced from the very outset with respect to this report by one of the Commission’s officials. I am glad to have heard Commissioner Špidla say today that he is fully supportive of the general line of this proposal.
I am baffled by the curious way in which Mrs Weisgerber submitted four retrospective amendments, and cannot understand the purpose behind her doing so. If, for example, you want to exclude trade unions from sharing responsibility for safety at work, that is an expression of a lack of desire for improvements in this area.
The free market must take second place to the workers’ fundamental right to health, safety at work and tolerable working conditions. Here in this House, I often get the impression that growth, productivity and competitiveness are valued for their own sake and cannot be questioned under any circumstances. Human beings, whether they be EU citizens, guest workers or temporary workers, must not be reduced to being economic fundamentals.
It is disturbing, and indeed shocking, that a research report should be able to state that no preventive measures are in place yet for around half the workers in the EU. It is women who are at a particular disadvantage. While fewer accidents are being recorded overall, it is an unfortunate fact that more of them are occurring in sectors in which most of the workers are women.
The home is not even recognised as a workplace, and no account is taken of workers in family firms, who are often women. What I have to remind those who think in purely economic terms is that prevention is more humane, and also cheaper. I would ask them to be rather more careful in adding up the ultimate cost to the economy of the philosophy of maximised business profits and of the negligent approach to safety at work. More accidents, with all their consequences, cost far more than a great many preventive measures ever could. No doubt the human suffering of the accident victims and their families does not add up to much of an argument in the eyes of those who think only of their own wallets.
If the entrepreneurs had to pay the resultant costs themselves, this debate on safety at work would doubtless progress in a quite different way, but, as the costs of fatal accidents, incapacitation, sickness and early retirement are largely borne by the public purse, many of them have no interest in accepting precautions and controls."@en1
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