Originally Posted by 1andrew1 (Post 35969527)

Not an obsession. But a bit strange that on a day when he's found to be breaking the law, Brexiiters suddenly become interested in the Working Time Directive. :D

Originally Posted by RichardCoulter (Post 35969510)

My point is that employers want employees to be totally flexible to their needs and that, whilst this law does exist and will help some people, most will ultimately have no choice.

Originally Posted by 1andrew1 (Post 35969530)

Two.

Originally Posted by Angua (Post 35969545)

Which employers though? I have worked shifts and in shops, now office based.

A huge number of employers still want Monday to Friday in some form or another. Most people I know work Monday to Friday including delivery drivers and care home workers.

Originally Posted by Angua (Post 35969545)

Which employers though? I have worked shifts and in shops, now office based.

A huge number of employers still want Monday to Friday in some form or another. Most people I know work Monday to Friday including delivery drivers and care home workers.

Originally Posted by Angua (Post 35969545)

Which employers though? I have worked shifts and in shops, now office based.

A huge number of employers still want Monday to Friday in some form or another. Most people I know work Monday to Friday including delivery drivers and care home workers.

Originally Posted by Pierre (Post 35969515)

A complete history here

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full...23263X18760547

Knock yourself out, once you’ve Read it, any chance of doing us a quick appraisal?

Originally Posted by Sephiroth (Post 35969534)

That link will do. The French thing is well known by those watching it at the time; they are also the ones that opposed the Services Directive for the same reasons.[COLOR="Silver"]

Originally Posted by jonbxx (Post 35969557)

Thank you so much for such a good source! It's fairly dry but I have certainly read dryer journal articles...

OK, so a quick appraisal of the article then (these are just my thoughts and interpretations);

• The initial proposal came from the commission as a Health and Safety proposal. The WTD does of course cover both social and Health and Safety policies. It's not clear how the initial proposal was decided to be one or the other. I have managed to find the original transmission to the Council of Ministers here - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-cont...PC0317&from=EN
• Including 'on call' time in the working hours is a tough one. Ideally, I would pro rate the 'on call' hours but what fraction would you assign to this on call time? Being able to pick up the phone to answer a quick question requires a whole different level of commitment to being ready to perform emergency surgery for example. Who decides the on call fraction?
• The aim to try and enforce the WTD on a 'per person' rather than 'per contract' by the commission during the attempted reviewing of the directive would have reinforced this as an H&S directive
• A 'per contract' enforcement of the WTD is more favourable to highly collective labour forces such as Germany and France, hence the feedback from consultations of works councils and lack of overall agreement on the setup of the WTD
• Like many EU directives, the WTD is a bit of a fudge, balancing local customs and the need for harmonisation. The 'fudging' allowed a number of opt outs that have been used to a greater or lesser extent by member states and some of these have needed reinterpretation by CJEU

Having to need the courts to refine laws is of course nothing new. From that paper, it does look like the WTD is a pretty 'loose' law, needing quite a lot of judicial clarification. However, I don't know if this is a normal level of intervention for EU or UK laws to be honest and it would be interesting to find out.

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I still haven't found evidence that the French were responsible for making this an H&S directive rather than a social one. I have only found the original proposal from the commission where it was already an H&S one. Was it at the Commission level? Assuming it was in the Second College of the Delors Commission, the commissioner in charge of Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion was Vasso Papandreou from Greece

Originally Posted by Dave42 (Post 35969525)

says the man that don't understand all treaty cease mean in article 50 and cut the abuse out I never abused you and not gonna stope to your level

Originally Posted by OLD BOY (Post 35969567)

As you may deduce from the above posts, the Working Time Directive, along with much other employment related legislation (such as the Acquired Rights Directive and the General Data Protection Regulation) is an employer's nightmare.

Originally Posted by Damien (Post 35969593)

Originally Posted by jonbxx (Post 35969592)

Oh absolutely but to not have these protections would be a employees nightmare.

Some EU countries go well beyond the directives, especially with employees rights and data protection - try backing up Belgian employee information on a US server or generating employee identifiable metrics in Germany and see how far you get! It tends to be that the countries with the best union/works council representation have the strictest regulations - you can get away with much more in the UK than Germany for example.