Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-10-Speech-2-057"
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"en.20050510.4.2-057"2
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"Madam President, the revised Lisbon strategy aims at growth and employment. Granted, we need to become more flexible and more competitive, but that is precisely what we find in the Cercas report on the Working Time Directive, and in the compromises on which my colleague Mr Silva Peneda and others from our group have worked.
We do not want to put the whole of the EU in a straitjacket; rather, we want a reasonable framework for action that leaves room for national regulations, for example to extend the reference period from four months to one year, provided that the social partners agree to this. Decisions on possible extensions of the 48-hour week, too, are a matter for them and for collective agreements. This is a practical expression of what subsidiarity and flexibility are about, but the basis for all this must continue to be the ruling in which the Court of Justice defined on-call time as working time. I regard the Commission proposal, which draws a distinction between paid active and unpaid inactive working time, as unrealistic.
I can tell Commissioner Špidla that I, on one occasion, joined the staff of the biggest accident and emergency unit in Hessen for their night shift. The junior doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers were on call, and extremely actively so. The short breaks between callouts were not long enough to allow the staff to recharge their batteries. It is not only in hospitals that workers are entitled to job security and job satisfaction; there is a need for derogations from the directive for fire brigades, including those on airports, for rescue workers and for security workers in environmentally sensitive enterprises. I have talked to all of them. Familiar though I am with the hospitals’ financial worries, they must do what has been done in other sectors and find intelligent ways of reducing costs, improving the coordination of their staff’s callouts and making better use of technical facilities.
Let us not forget the other costs that result when staff are, day in and day out, so stressed out that they run the risk of permanent damage to their health, not to mention the risk of exhausted staff making the wrong diagnosis or giving the wrong treatment. It is not acceptable that patients should be exposed to such risks."@en1
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