Quote:
Originally Posted by jonbxx
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.
---------- Post added at 10:42 ---------- Previous post was at 10:33 ----------
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 |
More to do with nmw rather than wtd but Whittlestone v BJP Home Support Ltd is the case law you need. Basically a care worker on duty overnight was to be paid even if sleeping as they were required to be on duty. By the same process the wtd would therefore also apply.