Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-15-Speech-1-069"
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"en.20081215.14.1-069"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, Minister, the review of the Working Time Directive has caught the attention and raised the concerns of millions of Europeans. In our view, the Council’s proposal is a huge political and legal mistake.
The third is that a personal, individual waiver of rights is an infallible formula for throwing the weakest members of society into the most inhuman situations of exploitation.
The last reason is that allowing the Member States to make national derogations from European law will open the door to social dumping among our countries.
We have plenty of research showing the extent to which use of the opt-out has resulted in enormous harm to workers’ health and safety. The same studies show how it makes it difficult for women to get jobs and have a career and how it makes it difficult to reconcile work and family life.
This proposal for a directive is therefore worse than the directive currently in force. In future, the opt-out would not be a temporary one-off exception but a permanent general rule and, what is more, it would be sanctioned in the name of freedom and social progress.
The other major discrepancy concerns the rights of healthcare personnel. It really is an immense injustice to those who care for the health and safety of millions of workers to stop counting their on-call time. Added to this absurdity is the weakening of the right to compensatory rest periods after periods on duty.
We tried to reach agreement with the Council so we could come to this plenary with a compromise solution, but it was not possible. You in the Council are not willing to negotiate and want your common position to go ahead without changing one iota.
I hope that on Wednesday this Parliament will put a stop to these intentions on the part of the Council. In that way it will show the whole of Europe that Parliament is alive and committed to the continued integration of Europe without forgetting the social dimension and the rights of doctors, workers, women and European citizens in general.
I also hope that, with the support and good offices of the Commission, we can then start conciliation and build a compromise acceptable to both branches of the legislature. We must ensure that flexicurity and the reconciliation of work and family life are taken seriously by the Council.
We have an opportunity. Let us make the most of it to bridge the huge gap between us and Europe’s citizens.
We often wonder why citizens are disaffected with our institutions, our elections or our political agenda. Today we have a clear explanation: you just have to look at the enormous gulf between the Council’s proposals and the views of 3 million doctors and all of Europe’s trade unions, representing 150 million workers.
I hope you do not see this – Parliament’s opposition – as a setback, but rather as an opportunity to reconnect with citizens’ concerns, so that people can see that when we talk of Europe’s social dimension, we are not just uttering empty words or making false promises.
The 48-hour working week is a very old aspiration. It was promised in the Treaty of Versailles, and it was the subject of the first ILO convention.
The aspiration of working to live and not living to work resulted in a virtuous circle of productivity improvements in Europe, accompanied by more free time for workers. We cannot go back on this paradigm.
The fears of globalisation or the attempts to gain comparative advantages seem to be making the institutions change their mind and forget that we shall only win the battle through excellence.
The Council’s position is the polar opposite of Parliament’s. We believe there are good reasons to take Parliament’s opinion on board.
The first is that the opt-out goes against the principles and the letter of the Treaty.
Secondly, opting out of the rule does not show the flexibility of the rule, but just annuls the law completely, renders international conventions and standards meaningless and takes industrial relations back to the 19th century."@en1
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