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Monday, 15 December 2008 - Strasbourg OJ edition

Organisation of working time (debate)
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  Dimitrios Papadimoulis, on behalf of the GUE/NGL Group. (EL) Mr President, the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left, which I have the honour to represent, is radically opposed to and rejects the Council's common position, which the Commission unfortunately also supports, because it is a reactionary proposal, a proposal that delights the employers' lobby and extreme neoliberals. It is a proposal which turns the clock of history back ninety years to 1919, when a working week of a maximum of 48 hours was secured. Instead, the common position maintains the anti-labour and anti-grassroots opt-out, abolishes the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Communities in terms of on-call time and promotes the twelve-month averaging of working time, thereby abolishing the precondition of collective bargaining. The Confederal Group of the Left is calling for the opt-out to be abolished, for the twelve-month averaging of working time to be abolished and for on-call time to count as working time.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Council and of the Commission, if your position were so pro-labour, then the employers' federations would be demonstrating here tomorrow, not the European trades union with fifty thousand workers. The truth is that the employers' federations are applauding you and the workers' trade unions will be outside Parliament tomorrow protesting, 'No to a minimum 65-hour week'.

Because you talk a great deal about social Europe, the maintenance of the opt-out is a loophole which was supposedly created by Mrs Thatcher several years ago for the United Kingdom and now you want to make this loophole even bigger and make it permanent. That is to refuse a social Europe, to refuse the common policy for the workers.

 
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