Quote:
Originally Posted by Bircho
You are correct. We did have holidays. New Years Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Spring Holiday, Summer Holiday, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
A whopping 7 of them. May day was added after we joined.
It was only in the mid 1990's that the right to paid holidays was introduced. Originally at 20 including the above public holidays, and then in the early 2000s changed to 28 including public holidays.
Until the Social directive of 20 days, there was no right to paid holidays other than the 8 public holidays. The Labour opposition at the time in the early 90s actually objected to its introduction although it was one of the first acts of the Tony Blair Government to introduce.
So, shall be now talk about the right to be sacked if a woman was pregnant which was only abolished after we joined as well?
Lots of the things we now take for granted were only introduced as a result of the EC. And why some people think it is ok to force people to work for more than 48 hours per week is beyond me.
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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.
---------- Post added at 09:30 ---------- Previous post was at 09:26 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by papa smurf
That was the only question she answered ,all she did was dither and dance around the other questions ,it was clear she was deceiving us imo .
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I let this go at the time, but having now seen the interview, I don't know how you can say that. She answered every question, and anything she did not say was due to continuing interruptions by Andrew Marr, who seems to prefer asking questions and not waiting to hear the answers unless it looks like the politician may have to admit something embarrassing. Then he frolicks in the squirming.
There was no squirming in this interview, so I think Theresa May won that contest.
---------- Post added at 09:31 ---------- Previous post was at 09:30 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mick
Sigh - all them laws will be protected once we leave - they will not be changed, we do not need to be stuck in a corrupt institution to be protected by laws we will already have.
That said - Some people WANT to work 48 hours a week, which is why they can tell their employer to waive the Working Time Directive on this issue.
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Agreed, Mick.
---------- Post added at 09:44 ---------- Previous post was at 09:31 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mick
There should be no concessions. The result was binary, leave won - so there should be no compromises, because we would not have got any had Remain won - The leave campaign have said all along that when we leave the EU, in it's entirety, we fall on WTO terms - It was not up to the Brexit campaign to enact the leave process. The point of a campaign is to win, when the leave camp won, it ceased to be a campaign after 24/6/16.
At the end of the day - May is rightly getting criticised because she previously drew all these red lines, saying Brexit means Brexit... then this Brexit White Paper is released after two years and it is a disaster, effectively making the UK worse off than it is now, while we are in the EU. Vassal State - nobody voted for that shit.
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I have some sympathy with that, because the referendum decision was to leave the EU. WTO rules would apply to all trade with other nations except where trade deals could be done, and much was made about forging new trade deals.
As far as the EU is concerned, I look at our negotiations as being just one of those trade deals. It should not tie us to the EU, but it should aim at achieving smoother trading relationships than we would get without such a deal.
I am looking at the progress on this very carefully because anything that smacks of drawing us back in needs to be resisted.
TM says there will be no free movement, we'll be outside the jurisdiction of the EU and out of the single market and customs union, CAP, Common Fisheries Policy, etc. To me, so far so good. But there is much in the White Paper that needs clarifying and I wait to see what is negotiated before passing judgement on that.
If the EU won't accept this limit on how far we are prepared to go, we need to walk away, we get WTO and Brexiteers will be happy. If she's criticised for that, at least she would be able to say that she tried, and everyone will be able to see that she did.
If they do accept, then most of our existing trade with the EU will be protected and we are out of the EU, free to forge our own trade deals. By the way, there is no reason why TM needs to accept a deal that restricts our ability to trade elsewhere. For me, that is a step too far.