EUROPEAN REVIEW

ISSUE 40 - Page 3

PORTUGAL BEGAN ITS SIX MONTH stint as the presidency of the EU in July and appears to be determined to make progress on two of the most contentious and long-lived problems among Member States. Both the possible amendment of the Working Time Directive and the framing of a new Temporary Work Agency law are of crucial importance for workers, particularly in the UK, and both have been frozen as agreement has proved impossible. Discussions on temporary agency work go back at least six years and the review of the Working Time Directive began in 2003. On both fronts the UK has played a decisive part in the defence of things as they are. Originally Britain was the only country to make use of opt-out clauses which allowed employees to work more than 48 hours per week and it has also led a ‘blocking minority’ of countries opposed to regulation of the work agencies sector which employs more people in the UK than in any other Member State.
During the Finnish presidency at the end of last year a breakthrough on working hours seemed imminent after the UK had been offered 60 hours as a weekly maximum but other countries objected to the fact that the deal left it up to Britain when to end the opt-out (see issue 36). On temporary agency work the stumbling block has been the so-called ‘grace period’ during which it will be permissible to pay an agency worker less than permanent employees doing the same job. The EU Commission suggested six weeks but some of the nay-saying countries wanted twelve months or more.
The Portuguese government is now holding talks with the ‘difficult’ countries to try to make sure that any compromise they propose has a chance of being accepted. One factor spurring them on is a court decision dating from 2003; in the Jaeger case (see issue 25) a German doctor’s complaint that being ‘on-call’ should be counted as working time was upheld. EU governments were expected to have to recruit extra medical staff, fire-fighters and teachers to keep the maximum working week to below 48 hours or apply for a UK-style opt-out. However nothing has happened so far despite a threat by the Commission to discipline those Member States still operating the old on-call arrangements. Now the EU ombudsman has increased the pressure by notifying the European Parliament that the matter has not been satisfactorily resolved. Nikiforos Diamandouros said he ‘considered that the commission was not entitled indefinitely to postpone dealing with the complaint on the grounds that the directive may be amended at some time in the future’. The Portuguese intend to continue talking with a view to bringing up these issues formally in December.

SINCE THE AMSTERDAM treaty of 1997 the EU has passed a number of laws that touch on the subject of discrimination. However the two main directives were an Employment Framework and one on Racial Equality. The latest date for implementing the first into national legislation was 2006 but the second should have been passed by all Member States by July 2003. Yet the Commission believes that at least 14 countries, including the UK, have not done this correctly. It has decided to send a ‘reasoned opinion’ to the laggards giving them two months to respond, failing which the matter will be referred to the European Court of Justice. One of the most common problems is national laws that only cover discrimination in the workplace whereas the racial equality directive also concerns social security, education and access to goods and services, including housing. Other divergences from the EU directives have been found in the definitions of indirect discrimination and harassment and inconsistencies in measures designed to help victims. ‘The right to be treated equally is a fundamental right, but every day across the EU people face discrimination in jobs, schools, shops, housing and healthcare because of the colour of their skin,’ said Vladimír špidla, the EU commissioner for employment, social affairs and equal opportunities.
The Commission is planning to go further. The present directive based on the Employment Framework, which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation is limited to the workplace at the moment. Now a public consultation has been launched to see how best to extend the law to other areas of society, ‘We want to hear the views of as many people as possible on how to take on discrimination effectively in areas such as healthcare, education and housing’ said Commissioner špidla. Next year it is hoped that new proposals will be put forward to deal with a widespread belief (64% of respondents in a recent Eurobarometer survey) that discrimination is still a problem in EU countries.