Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-15-Speech-2-010"
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"en.20100615.4.2-010"2
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"Madam President, today, this House is discussing an extremely difficult and sensitive subject. The question is whether or not entrepreneurs who are self-employed drivers should be covered by the directive on the working time of mobile workers.
The inclusion of entrepreneurs would be a precedent and a clear deviation from the general Working Time Directive. This directive only regulates the working time of employed workers, not of entrepreneurs. Discussions about the inclusion of self-employed drivers have been going on for a long time. Firstly, consultations between social partners in the 1990s did not yield any result. Then, the legislator could not reach a conclusion after four years of discussion – between 1998 and 2002 – and therefore asked the Commission for a thorough impact study. The Commission has now carried out studies and made an impact assessment which clearly demonstrates that this directive is not the right tool to address transport policy issues such as road safety or competition conditions, but that enforcement in respect of the non self-employed is a real issue. This is also the sense of the Commission proposal.
Firstly, I wish to express my deep respect for your rapporteur, Mrs Bauer, who has done an excellent job. I am very glad to see that the rapporteur shares the Commission’s concern over the weak enforcement of the rules and the general problem of false self-employment, and I appreciate Mrs Bauer’s constructive proposals. I believe that the rapporteur’s proposed amendments have the potential to protect employees even better against possible exploitation by employers.
Where Europe definitely needs action is in respect of so-called false self-employed drivers – that is, those drivers who are formally independent but, in practice, are employed by a single company which gives them orders and pays them. Both the Commission proposal and the amendments proposed by the rapporteur give a clear message to industry: the phenomenon of false self-employment will not be tolerated and the legislator will be vigilant in putting this rule into practice throughout Europe.
As regards road safety, let me stress that working time must not be mistaken for driving time. The situation regarding the latter has radically changed since 1998. As you know, this House, together with the Council, adopted new driving time rules, introduced modern, reliable digital recording equipment and adopted a specific directive on enforcement. Today’s debate is not on road safety. The statistics and the studies that the Commission has made available to Parliament give absolutely no indication that the inclusion of self-employed drivers would improve road safety.
At a time when we hope to begin to recover from the economic crisis, it would not be a good move to impose an additional administrative and financial burden on small and fragile undertakings which have managed to survive the economic recession. Instead of imposing red tape on entrepreneurs, Europe needs a working time directive which will really ensure protection to those employed and dependent drivers who need that protection."@en1
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