Employment Week: Work ahead

MEPs will be playing a critical role as legislators on the Services Directive, the Working Time Directive and REACH.

Vice-President of the European Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs Committee Thomas Mann outlines priorities.

In 2000, the aspiration of 15 European heads of state and government was to turn the EU into the world’s most successful, competitive and knowledge-based economy by the year 2010.

That aspiration, regarded at the time as ‘highly ambitious’, today seems to be disconnected from reality.

The OECD forecast for growth in the EU is a meagre 1.7 per cent. By contrast: a 3.6 per cent growth rate is anticipated for the US, and 8.8 percent for China.

In terms of the employment rate, instead of the 70 per cent that had been planned, the EU is plodding gamely along at 63 per cent.

Thus when the European spring summit met in Brussels on March 22 2005, the conclusions were sobering.

Speaking before the European Parliament,
Commission President Barroso announced his intention to get the ‘listing EU steamer’ back on course.

His remedy: concentrating on the areas of growth and employment. I welcome these priorities as ones that will particularly benefit SMEs. They account for over 80 per cent of all jobs and 70 percent of all training positions.

SMEs have been, and continue to be, the engine of the EU, but that engine has been spluttering of late due to deficiencies in the business environment.

The amended Lisbon Strategy has come in for a lot of criticism. The European
Commission has been accused, unfairly, of ‘neo-liberalism’.

At the most recent session of the parliament’s employment committee,
Commissioner Vladimir Spidla avowed himself an advocate of modernising the European social model.

It was not a question, he said, of lowering minimum standards, but of creating more and better jobs. In consultation with management and labour, programmes for achieving this goal should be presented and investment in education and training programmes enhanced. This is the right way forward, in my view.

Services Directive

The Services Directive should be consistent with the Lisbon Strategy.

The draft Services Directive is so controversial within the parliament and among governments that the commission has announced its intention to conduct a fundamental overhaul of the proposal.

The main problems are the country-of-origin principle and the applicability of the directive to public services.

The concern that the directive could result in social dumping and an intensification of competition within the EU – at the expense of the workforce – is unquestionably a valid one.

On the other hand, we cannot depart from the principle of making services freely available within the internal market.

We cannot allow bureaucratic, legal and financial obstacles to be created.

Working Time Directive

At the end of March 2005, in our committee, we conducted a debate on the Working Time Directive.

The discussion focused on three central points:

• The commission recommends introducing the concept of “inactive time during on-call time”, which would not be deemed to be part of working time.

• Member states may circumvent the maximum weekly working time through an opt-out clause.

• Member states will be allowed to expand the reference period for calculating the maximum weekly working time from four months, which has hitherto been the rule, for a period of up to 12 months.

In my view, dividing on-call time into “active” and “inactive” time fails to take account of the real world, as I myself have observed during night shifts in hospitals and also in visits with corporate security personnel and fire brigades.

Similar insights are derived from the realms of civil protection services, catering and transport.

From my point of view, all on-call time is working time. Any solutions deviating from this principle will need to be the subject of negotiations by management and labour.

In Britain, a departure from the 48-hour maximum weekly work week led to a drastic increase in time spent at work. As justified as the demands of businesses might be for greater flexibility and mobility of the workforce, it is just as necessary to protect the health of employees and to ensure greater compatibility of the workplace with family life.

REACH

I am the employment committee’s rapporteur for REACH. In October 2004, we conducted the first hearings by a parliamentary committee during the new legislative period on the EU chemical regulations.

The hearings were attended by over 150 experts and specialists from the chemicals industry, mid-sized business, unions, occupational medicine and the commission.

The hearings demonstrated that a unitary registration system is welcomed. However, in the form in which it has been proposed, it is too complex, bureaucratic and costly, particularly for SMEs.

REACH competes with the existing Occupational Health and Safety Directive and should be more clearly delineated from it.

“SMEs have been, and continue to be, the engine of the EU, but that engine has been spluttering of late due to deficiencies in the business environment.”

Neither producers of chemical substances, nor importers or downstream users, have a uniform tool at their disposal for evaluating the risks of a substance and relaying that information to others.

In order to create a practicable solution, the number of cases subject to evaluation should, in my opinion, be limited through the establishment of categories.

Priority for purposes of registration should be given to substances with the greatest potential for risk.

In order to do this, core information is needed, for example toxicological and environmentally relevant characteristics: purpose; exposure; quantities.

In this way, we can avoid creating ‘data graveyards’ and, at the same time, significantly reduce the costs of REACH.

I advocate not registering a substance a second time where it has already been registered centrally – the “one substance, one registration rule”.

Companies wishing to avoid sharing data with other companies in order to protect their own trade secrets must have the option of performing their own registrations. Consortia should be absolutely voluntary.

Final point: Products manufactured in the
EU are at a disadvantage vis-à-vis imports due to the higher costs imposed by REACH.

For this reason, the text of the chemical regulations must be drafted in such a way that the rules are capable of being adopted by other countries and are, in any event, WTO compatible.

Thomas Mann MEP, EPP-ED, Germany, is Vice-President of the European Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs Committee

This article was first published in a special issue of the Parliament Magazine produced in partnership with Employment Week 2005

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