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Originally Posted by OLD BOY
You are confusing the codification of pretty well everything which the EU likes to do with the way we used to work, which was simply by making rules where they were needed (by statute), and common law. We may not have had an actual statute about minimum holiday entitlements, but then again, how wohld any company recruit if it didn't offer paid holidays?
My father worked as a toolmaker, a milkman and a bus driver in his time and always received paid holidays.
By the way, you talk about people being forced to work more than 48 hours per week as if the Working Time Directive has stopped such practices. Are you aware of the number of hours per week doctors have been working since the Directive was implemented in the UK?
The fact is, the partially effective Directive seeks to control how many hours you can work on a voluntary basis as well. The 'opt out' was a hard won concession to Britain, but the EU never liked that and would seek to get rid of it at every opportunity. People should be free to work however many hours they goddam liked. By preventing that, some people on low wages with big commitments and were working the number of hours they were to survive suddenly had their lucrative overtime payments reduced, which put them in an impossible position.
You can try to paint this vaneer of respectability on the huge wealth of regulation the EU have created, but in the end it restricts our ability to compete and aims at exerting more and more control over how we live our lives. We simply don't need this.
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You are wrong on every count. The fact is many employers like to pay the bare minimum - whilst unemployment is low, competition for employees is only at one end of the spectrum; the low paid, low skilled jobs employers do not really care about employee attrition - they will always find someone to do the job until they can find something better. By the end of next year 12% of all employees will be paid the National Minimum Wage/National Living Wage. There is no competition for the low end spectrum and employers will try and get away with what they can - and they do. Look at how many get caught trying to get away with it. The last report from HMRC had over 800 employers on it - and they are the ones that were caught and reported.
It is the EU directive that has protected British workers, without it we would still be in the 90's of 7 days holiday and the rest by negotiation. You may be capable of expressing yourself, many aren't.
I think you ought to take a read of the WTD. If you had you know that Doctors and other emergency services are not covered by it.
Germany is one of the most regulated employment law countries in the world. It seems it is hard to go to the toilet without having to go through a works council. Their laws would send JRM into a permanent state of corma if they were to come in this country. Yet they don't seem to have any problems with competitiveness, with low wages, etc etc - and they are now allowed to work more than 35 hours per week, not 48 hours!
By the way, the bit about people losing their overtime etc is rubbish. The number that it affected was actually tiny. So small in fact that at the time they could not produce any figures to show.
So, show me one single EU regulation that has restricted "our ability to compete and aims at exerting more and more control over how we live our lives."