President. – The next item is the report (A5–0326/2002) by Mr Manuel Pérez Álvarez, on behalf of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, on the proposal for a Council recommendation concerning the application of legislation governing health and safety at work to self-employed workers [COM(2002) 166 – C5-0235/2002 – 2002/0079(CNS)]

  Pérez Álvarez (PPE-DE), rapporteur. – (ES) Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, point 4 of the Community health and safety strategy 2002-2006 which we have just debated calls for an extension to the scope of framework Directive 89/391/EEC – groups of workers excluded – and amongst other types of work it names that carried out by the self-employed.

The recommendation I am presenting and which we are debating in the European Parliament asks that the health and safety at work protection offered to salaried workers be extended to self-employed or independent workers.

Our thinking is based on the fact that workers who carry out their professional activity outside a working relationship with an employer or company are not generally protected by the Community directives relating to health and safety at work.

In fact only three directives refer to them, sometimes, tangentially – specifically Council Directive 92/57/EEC on the implementation of minimum safety and health requirements at temporary or mobile construction sites – and take account of self-employed workers carrying out their activities insofar as they may constitute a potential source of risk for salaried workers at those sites as a result of their activities. In other words, risks caused by the self-employed worker which they are not protected from.

Council Directive 92/29/EEC on the minimum safety and health requirements for improved medical treatment on board vessels does not fall specifically under Directive 89/391 and what I have said about Directive 92/57 also applies to it.

And the most recent Directive, Directive 2001/45/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 June 2001 amending Council Directive 89/655/EEC concerning the minimum safety and health requirements for the use of work equipment by workers at work, refers in one of its recitals to self-employed workers, pointing out that when they personally use work equipment they may put the health and safety of employed workers at risk, as if the self-employed worker were considered a risk factor not deserving of protection from the same risks, as if they were not considered truly a worker.

A large majority of Member States do not provide legal health and safety protection for self-employed workers, and there is great diversity and heterogeneity between levels of protection.

Measures and decisions to combat the conversion of risk into accidents have traditionally appeared linked to the concept of the employed worker, perhaps because the independent self-employed worker should take responsibility for their own health and safety, a reasoning which is insufficient and unjustified.

It therefore seems that action at Community level is required, in order to ensure a minimum degree of protection for self-employed workers against professional risks, because, as well as the self-employed worker isolated in a workplace with one or more self-employed workers, the development of the employment structure, when companies are subcontracting work to micro-companies or self-employed workers, gives rise to new work safety problems: the safety of self-employed workers and that of employed or self-employed workers who work alongside them. All workers deserve protection.

Self-employed workers seem to be subject to the same risks as dependent workers, but their deficient training and information may also be the cause of accidents and injuries for them and for other employed workers.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are faced with a broader problem, that of the organisation of work characterised by the use of workers provided by temporary work agencies, the dividing up of the productive process, allocating it to contractors, subcontractors and self-employed workers and externalised and decentralised production methods in general.

In my opinion, and I believe this is shared by everybody, the work safety protection of workers cannot depend on the legal status of each worker exposed to risks, whether they be independent, dependent or salaried. The Charter of Fundamental Rights does not make this distinction. Every worker has the right to work in conditions that respect their health, safety and dignity, according to the Charter. Where the law makes no distinction, neither must we.

The procedure for application is a recommendation which must facilitate the process, the objective of which is clear; the obligatory application to independent or self-employed workers of the same rules which are applicable to salaried workers.

It is clear that the culture of prevention takes on more significance here. In many cases, the self-employed workers themselves, who are the main beneficiaries, will have to invest in protection measures, and in others they will have to acquire their own information and training. Without getting into issues such as those relating to liabilities in certain types of accident, I believe that the constant and determined fight against accidents now has a new factor within the collective landscape: that offered by a culture of prevention in which the protagonists are the workers and the authorities themselves.

  Diamantopoulou, Commission. – (EL) Mr President, I should like to thank the rapporteur, Mr Pérez Álvarez, and the Members of Parliament for their report and their support.

This is an important proposal, designed as it is to ensure that all workers are protected in the workplace because, as Mr Álvarez has explained so well, and there is no need for me to repeat what he has said, workers cannot be treated differently depending on how their work is defined. The purpose of this initiative is to guarantee the same level of protection for self-employed workers and employed workers and it calls on the Member States to distinguish between three types of action.

The first is to include self-employed workers within the scope of health and safety at work regulations, assuming, of course, that their national legal systems so allow.

Secondly, it calls on the Member States to take the necessary measures so that self-employed workers can access information, training and technical support on risk prevention. The third element is that the Member States are called on to provide access to suitable health monitoring systems.

It would appear that most of your amendments address situations where employed workers and self-employed workers work alongside each other and I agree that this sort of situation needs to be defined more clearly in the recommendation. The Commission therefore accepts Amendments Nos 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10 and 11 and will make every effort to ensure that the Council does likewise. The Commission does not agree with Amendments Nos 2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14 and 15 because they are either included in other amendments or call for certain binding legal arrangements which prejudge the efficacy of the recommendation during its first four-year pilot application.

The Commission feels that this proposal is an important step towards ensuring that legislation benefits all Europeans, irrespective of their type of work, a step towards the final objective of reducing accidents at work and occupational illnesses.

  Hughes (PSE). – Mr President, I would like to thank Mr Pérez Álvarez for an incisive and thoughtful report.

The application of health and safety legislation to self-employed workers is an important subject, not least because of the ever-growing number of self-employed, subordinated, sub-contracted or atypical workers. The creation of false forms of independence and self-employment can put workers who are in an employment situation beyond the framework of protection. That is something we need to address.

This is something that the Commission recognises and, working together, as Mr Pérez Álvarez has said, we have tried to do something about it over the years. The extension of working time protection to road transport personnel in the directive, agreed at the end of last year, will cover owner-drivers, but only because parallel legal bases covering occupational health and safety on the one hand, and operational safety on the other have been used.

As Mr Pérez Álvarez has pointed out this evening, the issue was also tackled in the framework of the directive on temporary and mobile work sites, but in a fairly limited way. We therefore needed a more comprehensive approach and this recommendation may prove to be a useful contribution.

But other actions are possible, such as the more general extension of health and safety legislation to the self-employed suggested in Mr Pérez Álvarez's Amendment No 4. I know the Commission has difficulty with that. The Commissioner will say that the legal base in Article 137 will not permit this. But, if the recommendation does not have a positive impact, then we will all collectively need to come back together to reconsider the legal bases that are available to us and maybe take the route suggested in Mr Pérez Álvarez 's Amendments Nos 7 and 22.

If not, imagine the sort of problems we face in relation to, for example, the proposed directive we are currently considering on protection of workers from risks related to exposure to asbestos at work. We have massive amounts of asbestos hidden in our workplaces, homes, schools and hospitals. Many people with employment contracts will handle it and, if they work for a demolition, removal or transportation company, they will be covered.

But a whole army of self-employed workers are also exposed to asbestos, in particular the electricians, plumbers and carpenters who come across it while doing maintenance work. They will be predominantly self-employed.

It is also true that, even if we had a tenfold increase in the number of inspectors, they could not inspect this whole army of self-employed people at work. They need to be able to take responsibility for themselves. They need the information, the support and training to understand the risks they run if they take short cuts. The recommendation is a very useful contribution in that respect.

  Bouwman (Verts/ALE). (NL) – Mr President, Commissioner, Mr Pérez Álvarez. Thank you for this sound report. I should above all like to focus on one element in this report in which reference is made to the Commission’s approach, which has been relatively cautious so far. The topic is labour relations. Everyone knows that they change at an incredible rate, and when I say an incredible rate, I mean an incredible rate. As has been mentioned by different people, these encompass non-typical work of different kinds, and include temporary staff, the self-employed, the self-employed without staff, the spurious self-employed etc., a large number of whom attend the workplace to work. This is not only important for the workers’ own health, safety and well-being, but also for that of those indirectly involved. In other words, changes do need to be made, particularly if you consider current legislation in the different countries and realise that some countries include the self-employed in their occupational health and safety legislation to some extent, while other countries do not at all.

The Commission has opted for a recommendation. I would have preferred a stronger instrument, with immediate effect. The reason is simple: we can accept the fact that a kind of evaluation is planned in four years' time and better measures will follow if need be, but on the other hand – and I should like to come back to this in connection with the previous topic – at what stage is the enforcement of this legislation monitored? In the workplace and, if you are lucky, by labour inspectorates. This inspection is often inadequate, however. The most forceful impact is exercised by employers’ organisations, trade unions in the workplace, works councils or other consulting organisations. They carry out this work, and without legislation they have no leg to stand on. Relations between employers and employees at the workplace are being completely overlooked here. This is of crucial importance, and this is why tougher legislation will be needed in this area in due course.

  Skinner (PSE). – Mr President, perhaps the most surprising thing about this is that in the committee vote it was only passed by 36 to 1. I would have thought that anything like this would automatically have got unanimity in committee. It is quite revealing also that it is only a recommendation. As the Commissioner will know from the 'falls from heights' directive, it was pretty clear that we needed a very strong political message to cover the self-employed. It is not only the construction industry that suffers from accidents every day of the week. For instance, the interpreters in the booths around us, who are often self-employed and have to work under very stressful conditions, are the very people we would expect to receive Community protection under Community law. You know very well that the European institutions abstain from introducing any of those laws to cover many of their staff, so we will not go down that path.

There is no doubt that by recommending Community health and safety legislation for the self-employed we have taken a giant step forward. We should no longer rely on national statistics which tell us that accidents only happen to full-time employees. That is clearly ridiculous. You might – if you are a Christian – call a it sin that so many people involved in industries, just because they are considered self-employed, do not enjoy the protection they deserve. Mr Pérez Álvarez has spent a long time discussing health and safety in this Parliament. I am very pleased that he has taken on this report, because I know the commitment we need from all sides of the House.

It is vital for the self-employed to be included in any health and safety and employment legislation that emanates from the Commission and this House. Everyone in Europe must enjoy the same level of protection.

  Thorning-Schmidt (PSE). – (DA) Mr President, a survey carried out by the Bilbao Institute shows in actual fact that the self-employed suffer occupational accidents, including fatal ones, more frequently than are those who are employed. We also know that there is very considerable under-reporting of accidents involving the self-employed. A survey in Britain reveals, for example, that only 5% of accidents involving the self-employed are reported, compared with half of those involving wage earners. It is also the case that the self-employed are more vulnerable to occupational accidents than wage earners because of their limited resources and perhaps because they do not have to comply with the health and safety provisions.

The Commission must therefore be commended for raising the issue. Clearly, such non-compliance must be brought to an end. The self-employed must not be able to freewheel when it comes to the EU rules on the working environment. We should, however, have liked the Commission to have looked at some of the amendments that try to make the recommendations more binding. I am aware that there is no basis in the Treaty for doing this. If we are now all agreed that there is a problem in its not being possible for the self-employed to be covered by the legislation governing the working environment, is it not then time we tried to change the Treaties? Perhaps the Commission should be called upon to table a proposal on the subject to the Convention that is currently at work.

  President. – The debate is closed.

The vote will take place tomorrow at 12 noon.