Weak working time rules have had almost no effect in UK

Ahead of today’s (Wednesday) meeting of the European Commission, the TUC has published new research showing that weak working time rules and the UK opt out from the 48 hour limit on the average working week has made little difference to the UK’s long hours culture, and has accused the government of spinning statistics to exaggerate a slight fall in long hours working. The TUC says it will take 45 years at the current rate of progress before long hours working falls to the EU average.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber has written to the EU Commission ahead of their consideration of proposals to reform European working time rules to ask the Commission to defer a decision on their proposals to allow more discussion with union and employer representatives.

Brendan Barber writes:

UK workers are going to be left exposed to dangerous long hours working by these weak reforms to our weak working time protections. Nearly four million UK employees are regularly working over 48 hours a week. The UK has more long hours workers than any other European country and although the number has fallen slightly at the current rate of reduction we will not reach the European average for 45 years.

Working long hours is bad for health and bad for business. We urge the Commission to abandon their current proposals to enable further consultation with unions and employers as neither are content with what is on the table.

Current Commission proposal on Working Time Directive review

The Commission are likely to consider a proposal that would maintain the individual employee opt-out of the 48 hour week in the UK but allow unions, or other staff representative bodies, to agree collective opt-outs.

As well as collective workforce agreements Individuals will still be able to opt out of the 48 hour week. But opted-out workers would not be able to work more than 65 hours in any one week and would have to renew the opt-out every 12 months. Employers would not be able to ask employees to sign an opt-out before they start work (i.e., when they sign their contract) or during probation periods.

Employees who had not signed the opt-out would be allowed to work an average of 48 hours a week over 12 months, instead of the current four month period.

If the Commission agrees a position this will be proposed to the EU Council of Ministers and European Parliament.

UK long hours culture

Contrary to reports the September ONS labour market statistics do not show the demise of the long hours culture in the UK.

A reported reduction in the actual hours of work per week for full-time employees from 37.4 to 37.1 (year to June 2004) represents the numbers of hours the sample worked in one particular week. As the working time limits are applied to an average the more accurate measure is of average usual hours worked a week.

The figures also showed a very small reduction in the number of employees working more than 45 hours a week most likely due to employees working 45 - 48 hours moving to the 42 - 45 bracket. The TUC’s main concern are those the working time rules were made to protect - the 3.75 million UK employees regularly working over 48 hours a week. The numbers of these have fallen by only 7% since 1998 and at that rate it would take 45 years to reach the EU average when we could expect the UK to have around 1.25 million long hours workers (mostly managers and professionals exempt from the working week limits).

The opt-out was supposed to phase in the 48 hour week but in fact it has left millions of employees exposed to long hours working. TUC research shows that only one in three people with jobs know that the law protects them against working more than 48 hours a week and nearly two out of three people who say they work regularly more than 48 hours a week say they have not been asked to opt out of the working time regulations. One in four who have signed an opt-out say they were given no choice about signing away their rights.

Full letter from Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary to EU Commissioner Stavros Dimas Dear Mr Dimas

Review of the Working Time Directive 93/104/EC
I am writing to express the TUC’s grave concerns to the European Commission about the proposals to modify the Working Time Directive, which are due to be considered on 22 September.

My understanding is that the Commission is likely to propose that the opt-out from the 48-hour average weekly limit on working time should be retained, albeit with some amendments.
My view is that the proposals are far too weak to have a real impact on the UK’s long hours culture. In particular, it is difficult to envisage how a worker who is not a member of a trade union will be able to enforce their working time rights. The TUC’s own polling has found that one third of those who have signed the opt-out say that they had no choice about the matter, whilst the Government’s own statistics show that 68 percent of those who work more than 48 hours per week want to work fewer hours.

It is absolutely right that the European Commission should set EU-wide minimum health and safety standards like the Working Time Directive. The health and safety basis of the directive is a robust one, having been tested in the ECJ by the UK’s previous Conservative Government.

However, it is an established principle of European law that the route to flexibility in applying minimum standards is through collective bargaining. The rationale is that only organised workers have a sufficiently powerful voice to bargain with employers in a meaningful way. In most cases, unorganised individual workers have the unpalatable choice of simply doing what they are told or quitting.

It follows that the development of Social Europe implies an entrenched role for a collective voice for workers. The Commission’s draft proposal to review the Working Time directive is likely to have the opposite effect in the UK, because the establishment of two separate routes to the opt-out would create a new incentive for employers not to bargain with trade unions. In many ways, we regard this proposal as the worst of the four options in the Commission’s consultation paper.

This detrimental effect on trade unions would be further reinforced by the proposal to allow member states to extend the reference period for calculating the 48-hour week from four to twelve months, thus removing the union role in accessing this flexibility.

The truth is that the general directive already allows employers great flexibility. Trade unions are ready to deal with these issues in an intelligent way and are currently signing productivity deals that bargain away excessive hours whilst delivering benefits to employers and workers alike.

Yet most long hours employers will not take any action to protect workers unless the law is changed. Six years after the UK Working time Regulations took effect there are still 3.75 million employees in the UK regularly working more than 48 hours per week. The figure has declined by a mere 7 percent since 1998. At this rate of progress many workers will have to wait a lifetime before they are protected from excessive hours.

The opt-out provisions were intended to be a temporary measure to help the UK to reach compliance. In practice, the opt-out has meant that the minority of employers who use long working hours have seen no need to make any changes.

The Commission’s draft proposals have been criticised by trade unions and employers alike. For instance, the Confederation of British Industry has said the proposals are completely unacceptable. There is now a real danger that the review of the Working Time Directive will end up making life more difficult for both parties. In my view there would now be a great deal of merit in consulting the social partners on the proposals being put to the Commission on Wednesday to try to tease out a more acceptable way forward, and I would urge you to postpone a Commission decision on the issue until those discussions have taken place

Brendan Barber
TUC General Secretary