Call for time cuts to tackle unemployment

Date: 03/10/1996

By Michael Mann

AS Europe waits impatiently for a decision on the UK's legal challenge to the Working Time Directive, MEPs have backed a new report calling for further limitations in the working week.

While negotiators at the Intergovernmental Conference struggle towards a consensus on how to cut into unemployment figures of 18 million, former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard's report claims that “a massive reduction in working time is a crucial weapon in the fight against unemployment”.

In a move unlikely to impress either employers or those member states unhappy with too much Union interference in employment policy, Rocard calls for shorter working hours, but without significant salary cuts or higher costs to business.

Instead, member states are urged to divert some of the money currently used to support the jobless into subsidies to maintain salary levels despite reduced working hours.

To discourage firms from giving in to the temptation to stick to more traditional labour patterns, the French Socialist - who claims that the amount of overtime worked in the EU is equivalent to 3 to 4 million jobs - suggests much-reduced social security contributions for the first 32 hours worked by each employee every week, increasing for every hour beyond that.

His approach has received the unequivocal support of the European Trade Union Confederation, optimistic of a real shift in position now that the Commission has pledged to look at taking in some of the eight sectors excluded from the scope of the original Working Time Directive.

But European employers have slammed it as “a rather simplistic analysis of what is an extremely complex problem”.

They claim the evidence of the last two decades does not show a correlation between reduction in working time and falling unemployment, and stress that potential inflationary pressures could lead to even more jobless.

British Socialist MEP Ken Coates, a major campaigner for full employment in the Union, is determined to take the debate further and is sharply critical of the lack of positive action by the Council of Ministers to implement either the Delors White Paper on competitiveness or Jacques Santer's 'confidence pact'.

Launched in July, Coates' European Appeal for Full Employment has now been signed by more than 500 parliamentarians from around Europe, with numbers continuing to rise.

The MEP is also masterminding a series of marches against unemployment to be held next spring. These are designed to converge in Amsterdam to coincide with the signing of the new EU treaty which comes out of the IGC process.

MEPs are looking to next month's European Employment Week - organised under the patronage of their president Klaus Hänsch - to act as a focus for the numerous, often contradictory, initiatives being taken.