I wonder how many of us have at some time in our working lives failed to comply with this particular EU directive?
Business forced to adopt EU six-hour work limit
By David Charter, Europe Correspondent
EMPLOYEES will be banned from working for more than six hours without a break after a defeat for the Government in Europe.
Businesses were ordered yesterday to ensure that their staff took minimum rest periods, after existing guidelines were dismissed as “meaningless” by the European Court of Justice.
The ruling means that employers must ensure that staff take off at least 11 hours between working days, and have a minimum of 1 day off a week, as well as a 20-minute rest after every 6 hours of work. Business groups said that employees would be unable to choose to work long hours to earn more money because they would be forced to take breaks against their will.
But Brussels said that the decision simply brought Britain in line with the rest of Europe.
Read on...
It's a tricky one. On the one hand I do think that employees have a right to avoid being forced to work lengthy hours without a break. However, I have also been part of businesses that frequently required (and indeed thrived) on midnight oil burning sessions and to be completely honest I look back on the days when I regularly worked a 70-80 hour week with a certain measure of pride. (It's worth mentioning that I was paid overtime.)
The bit that bothers me is this:
The ruling from the court in Luxemburg stated: “The [DTI] guidelines are liable to render the right of workers to daily and weekly rest periods meaningless because they do not oblige employers to ensure that workers actually take the minimum rest period, contrary to the aims of the Working Time Directive.”
Not being forced to work long hours is one thing. Being forced NOT to work long hours is another. Can anyone suggest a sensible balance between regulation and personal freedom on this issue? (A genuine question, not a rhetorical gauntlet.)
2 comments:
"EMPLOYEES will be banned from working for more than six hours without a break after a defeat for the Government in Europe.
[...]
But Brussels said that the decision simply brought Britain in line with the rest of Europe."
For me, the crucial point in this story about the enforced six hour work limit is that it is a classic example of how laws are now set by the EU often against our Government's wishes.
Another example of EU directive being passed into British law without debate in parliament is the the new car seat legislation. This is what economist blogger Tim Worstall thinks of it:
We don't actually get to make our own laws any more. We simply have to take what is thrust upon us. Worse, the system by which most of our 'partners' work is entirely alien to our own legal traditions. We have a system, often honoured merely in the breach but still, where law is essentially a list of things you may not do. Continental law is more a list of things you may or must. Imposing one system on top of the other simply will not work, not if we are also to keep the freedoms and liberties we think traditional.
If we actually wish to govern ourselves, if we wish our elections to make any damn difference to the laws of this country (which is the minimum meaning of democracy) then we must leave the EU.
The new age discrimination regulation is another example of a law being enacted by EC directive without debate in Parliament (and just to be clear here it, isn't the law that bothers me so much as the fact that laws are being passed without discussion by our elected representatives).
A new law comes into force today, making it illegal to discriminate against people because of age, and on Friday the BBC's Today programme carried three long items on it, pointing out the law's many flaws and anomalies.
Do you remember the great debates on this issue in Parliament? Of course not, because the law was never debated by Parliament. What we were not told by the Today programme, or Alistair Darling, the "responsible minister" whom it interviewed at length, is that the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006 were nodded through under Section 2(2) of the European Communities Act, enacting EC directive 2000/78. Our MPs had no choice in the matter.
Full article here.
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