Splits remain over working hours

Date: 20/05/1999

By Simon Coss

EU GOVERNMENTS remain divided over proposals aimed at ensuring that millions more European employees are covered by the Union's rules on working hours.

At a meeting in Brussels next week, EU social affairs ministers will discuss the complex issue of extending the 1993 Working Time Directive - which established a maximum working week of 48 hours - to a whole range of professions currently outside the scope of the legislation.

The excluded sectors include large swathes of the transport industry, such as truck and train drivers, airline cabin staff and sailors, as well as trainee doctors, fishing crews and workers on oil and gas platforms at sea.

EU diplomats hope that next Tuesday's (25 May) meeting will make significant progress in a number of these areas, although they stress that social affairs ministers do not have the authority to resolve the issue on their own, as the rules covering transport workers will have to be agreed by their transport counterparts. Next week's talks are unlikely to even broach the highly sensitive question of drawing up working time rules for Europe's truck drivers.

Social affairs ministers will, however, try to reach agreement on two of the other excluded sectors which have proved particularly problematic until now: junior doctors and fishing crews.

Union governments and the European Commission are still split over how quickly the maximum 48-hour-week rule should be phased in for junior doctors.

At one end of the spectrum are the UK and Ireland, which argue that a 15-year change-over period is needed to avoid creating shortages of qualified doctors in national health care systems.

" If we do not have this length of time, then either patient care will be put at risk or we will be forced to poach doctors from South Africa and eastern Europe, which we do not consider to be a very responsible attitude," said one British diplomat.

The Commission, which came forward with a detailed legislative proposal on the excluded sectors last November, firmly rejects this argument, claiming that member states would be perfectly capable

of introducing a maxium 48-hour week seven years after EU governments have agreed the details of the new rules.

The compromise now being pushed by the German presi-dency would lay down an eight-year phase-in period from the moment the directive enters into force. Governments are normally granted between two and three years to enact EU legislation, so if the German compromise were accepted, trainee doctors would not be covered by the new rules for another 11 years.

Top EU diplomats decided at a meeting last week that they had enough confidence in the German proposal to put it on the agenda for next week's ministerial talks. But officials stress that the final decision will have to be made by ministers themselves.

Divisions also remain over the proposed new rules to govern fishing crews. Copenhagen wants to exclude them from the legislation altogether, arguing that the nature of their job makes it impractical to draw up rigid rules on working hours. "Fishermen have to fish when the fish are there," said one Danish official.

But Denmark says that if it cannot persuade other governments to agree to a complete exemption, it would accept a deal based on existing International Labour Organisation (ILO) rules for seafarers.

Copenhagen has already drafted a compromise proposal which draws heavily on the ILO regulations. This sets out daily and weekly limits on working time, but does not stipulate the number of hours a person should work over longer 'reference periods' such as a year.

It is not at all clear, however, whether this will be acceptable to other member states. The Commission, along with countries such as Spain and Italy, wants any deal to include a long-term reference period.

Keyword: Working time.