Working-time talks collapse
Council and Parliament fail to set date for phase-out of opt-outs from maximum working week.
By Jim Brunsden
Negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers on revising the EU's rules on working time have collapsed, with both sides blaming the other.
Talks between the European Parliament and the Czech government, which holds the presidency of the Council of Ministers broke up last night without a deal on the proposed revision.
The two sides were unable to reach agreement on whether or not to set a date for phasing out national opt-outs from the EU's 48-hour maximum working week and on whether the time that doctors and other workers spend on-call should be counted as working time.
The European Commission said that it would take a political decision on whether to try and revive all of part of the revision. It is the first time since the Amsterdam treaty took effect in May 1999 that conciliation negotiations between the Parliament and Council have failed to reach a deal.
Petr Nečas, the Czech labour minister, who led negotiations for the Council, said that MEPs had given "priority to ideology over political and economic reality" and that the negotiations were "undoubtedly influenced" by the approaching European parliament elections. The MEPs who led the negotiations blamed the Czech presidency's inability to compromise further and the blocking tactics of a minority of national governments.
Vladimír Špidla, the European commission for employment and social affairs, said that the institutions' positions had proved to be "irreconcilable", but that a "particular" problem was MEP's insistence on setting an end date for national opt-outs. He said that the Commission will "reflect on the result, and decide what, if anything, we do next".
Officials said that the Commission's options include presenting a proposal dealing only with the issue of on-call time, and launching infringement proceedings against member states not in line with current EU working time legislation. The Commission sent letters to 25 member states last year warning of irregularities, and has in the past hinted that it would pursue infringement proceedings if there was no deal on the revision. The issue of on-call time has been the subject of judgments in the European courts.
Both the Czech presidency and the European Commission said that the failure to reach a deal would lead to a worse situation for workers in Europe. Špidla said that more member states were likely to apply opt-opts to the 48-hour week, thus weakening workers' protection. "The bigger the number of countries using the opt-out, the more difficult it will be to get rid of this exception in the future," Nečas said. A total of 15 member states currently apply either total or sectoral opt-outs from the maximum 48-hour working week.
MEPs insisted that they had been ready to discuss further compromises based on proposals submitted by the Commission last week. Mechtild Rothe, a German Socialist MEP and the Parliament's lead negotiator, said that "the Parliament itself showed considerable will to compromise". "It was simply impossible for Parliament to do any more," she said.
Alejandro Cercas, a Spanish Socialist MEP who drafted the Parliament's report on the revision, said that Parliament could not accept allowing national opt-outs to continue forever. "You can't have this permanent derogation which undermines the health and safety of workers", he said. "The Council [of Ministers] was offering us something that was worse than the current situation," he added.
Philip Bushill-Matthews, a UK centre-right MEP, said however that Parliament's negotiators had chosen the wrong approach. "The socialist-dominated negotiating team interpreted their negotiating mandate from the Parliament very rigidly, and refused to accept compromises," he said. "Parliament's 'all or nothing' approach ensured that the result was nothing," he added. John Cridland, deputy director-general of the CBI, the UK employers' organisation, welcomed the breakdown of the talks. "Keeping the opt-out is a victory for common sense and is good for the UK economy," he said.
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