Parliament OKs 48-Hour Maximum Work Week

Yahoo News:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_employment_rules

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By JAN SLIVA, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 53 minutes ago

STRASBOURG, France - The European Parliament voted Wednesday in favor of an obligatory 48-hour maximum work week, saying that an opt-out widely used by Britain should be scrapped.

The opt-out, which allows employees to work longer hours if agreed with the employer, has also been applied to specific industries like health care in other countries, including Germany and Luxembourg.

Lawmakers voted for it to be phased out over three years following the adoption of a new EU Working Time Directive, expected in 2007. Socialist, Labour and Green deputies supported scrapping the opt-out, while the European People's Party and some independent lawmakers voted against the proposal by 378 votes to 262. There were 15 abstentions

more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_employment_rules

Looking out for workers? What a concept. I wish U.S. gave a shit about U.S. workers. :(

countries in worker protection and health care.

arguing against limiting the working hours of hospital residents.

48 hours? When I was a chef I would work between 60 and 100 hours a week. When I was a waiter I would sometimes work double shifts every day for a few weeks at a time. Would I be unable to do that under this law? I would sure as hell, hope not. Those experiences were some of the best of my life and the extra money I made allowed me to take time off when I wanted to and enabled me to do the things I wanted to do. No one forced me to work and I would have been pissed if someone prevented me from working.

You can only work when they say you can.

It's everyone's god given right to put in a 14 hour day.

it sounds like you got comp time and extra pay for putting in the extra time.

What I remember is being told to put in a 50 hour week - no extra pay (I was on salary), no comp nothing nada zippo. If I didn't like it I could leave. I suspect my experience is a bit more common these days.

is that you can spent 2 hours a day goofing off on DU, and you still get paid!

overworking employees. It doesn't stop employees from taking second jobs.

And there will be more second, part-time jobs available, because of the limit, and it will ensure that no one boss can exert excessive influence over an employee.

see my post below instead of rehashing my story. Sometimes you NEED to work more than 48 hours in a week.

A law to prevent an employeer overworking employees shouldn't prevent an employee from working more if they want to....It's tricky...

I'd say a 48 hour cap is ok...with exceptions...Say an 'ultra-max' cap at 90 hours...where you absolutly can't work more than that period....but that extra 42 hours of that week can only be done say 4 times a year...or 3 times a year....that allows for 'crunch time' work...

It needs to protect against an employeer overworking an employee instead of hiring 2 also....so as you go higher and higher in hours progressively increase overtime so that it makes it cost prohibitive to regularly overowrk somebody. Make it more cost effective to have two people working at 40 hours a week than one person at 80.

Things like that...you can't just set a hard cap on hours though. Sometimes you really need to get something done.

If you need to work 90 hours, it would probably make the situation less exploitative if someone else had to hire you. If employers can't work people over 48 yours, there will be more jobs available.

Do you think having to find a second job to get that other 42 hours you wanted to work each week would be that big of an obstacle?

I think it would give workers more leverage. They may even find that one of the two bosses might be willing to give them a raise so that you can work fewer hours at higher wage rates. It's always good to have multiple suitors. If you have one boss who knows he can work you 90 hours, I think it reduces the chance you'll get a raise, and it will reduce the chance that you'll meet some other boss who values your time and work more.

I could be way off here, but I really think that having two different employers in order to increase your hours is not only not a hurdle, but is also good for workers.

I'm just saying that situations exist where you need to go over 48 hours...

As I mentioned in my story below my group screwed up...we needed to get maybe 3 months work done in a months time...we ended up working 80-90 hours a week HARD during that time, including on a national holiday. We were actually given some additional paid time off for doing that which I didn't mention before. My point is that if we hadn't done that, the entire project would have been off and we might have lost the contract. If we had lost that contract we might have gone out of business. If we had gone out of business I definately would have lost my job.

Sometimes when you work for a company it's O.K. to care about the company and it's product. You can take pride in it, even if you don't normally like to work more than 30 hours a week. Sometimes you need to work your ass off.

Working 90 hours a week for 4 weeks was really really hard and I'd never force anyone to do it. Sometimes though you have to look at the bigger picture.

Plus what's a person supposed to do if they can only work 48 hours a week but they aren't allowed, by their contract, to work for another company doing that...That happens too.

"Managers, CEOs and employees elected by the board of their company would still be able to apply for the opt-out under strict conditions. However, workers in emergency services would have to stick to a 48-hour week."

What happens if say there is a massive chemical or radiological attack or accident...Would emergency workers not be allowed to work past 48 hours a week if there were a huge emergency session?

An airplane crashes into a primary school and 300 children are rushed to local intensive care units...There aren't enough nurses to do 48 hours a week and cover them all...

Do we let the kids die?

And therefore would be allowed. I can think of a fair number of grey area cases that aren't life and death, but could still be considered emergencies, though. Say, a work disruption in postal service, that required intense overtime afterwards to ensure pension cheques got to seniors.

I would imagine that true corporate crises would fall under that category as well - for example an equipment breakdown that required intense overtime to get a factory running or else a town's workforce would be laid off.

But many corporate crises and drop-dead deadlines are actually no big deal, as anyone who has worked for any length of time knows.

The engineers at my employers facilities in Germany are required by Law to take 6 weeks vacation every year. It is illegal for them to work during their vacation. I can't imagine putting someone on trial for it. But they tell me that is the law.

I'm sure TONS of people simply REFUSE to go on 6 weeks vacation. :eyes: The german jails must be packed with these offenders.

who gets busted for not taking their vacation.

Who WANTS to work more than 48 hours? Do you believe people should be all work and no life?

Fortunately with the minimum wage in the UK no one NEEDS to work that much in order to survive like they do here.

Some chemist and demolitions experts just love blowing crap up.
Some computer programmers just love writing programs.
Some daycare providers just loving playing with children.

There are people who love their jobs so much that they don't do it for money. People shouldn't be forced to work more than 48 hours a week, include those stupid management posistions that they try "promoting" you to. But they should be able to if they want.

I find it amusing people who probably have never even set foot in the UK know better than british MPs what the UK people want - especially considering an election was just held.

As for those people who just "love" the work they do - I feel pity for them if they have a family. I spent so little time with my father growing up that I have literally almost no memories of him because he was at work so damn much. You know what I think you can do with your damn corporate "oh people just LOVE working all the time" attitude? Shove it. There are more important things in life besides making work the majority of it. Perhaps you're too young to realize that, but when you look back years from now and say "god, I wonder why I never got to spend much time with my family" remember this post. Then thank wal-mart or whatever corporation used you for the favor. Or perhaps you're just fortunate enough to be on the upper bracket of the economy.

in Europe.. The article pointed out that the generous "holiday" time and the shorter week, actually IMPROVED productivity, and allowed for lower unemployment..

I guess they are following US now.. (only they don;t know that we are headed off a cliff)

Europe is starting to deal with outsourcing too.
Some are trying to increase the number of hours to help ward off outsourcing to China and India.

..I say this as someone who holds a British passport and has set foot in the UK though I live in the US now under my American passport...

There ARE people who like working that much...I also consider them lunatics. Work just shouldn't take you away from your family and friends and LIFE that much. Some people though...their work IS their life...It's sad really.

My point though is the rigidity of the law. It's one thing to say that nobody can be forced to work more than 48 hours a week. It's another to say that an employee who chooses to not work more can't be punished or treated unfairly because of that choice.

It's another thing ENTIRELY to tell a person that when their timer reaches 48 hours that week...ding...they're done...

I've had to work far more than that on occasion because we needed to get something done. It was holding up other people. We had screwed up and had a month to get done what would normally take much longer. We put in 80-90 hour weeks that month to catch back up. Did the company ask us to? No. Did it nearly kill me? Yes. Was I happy that we did it? Definately. I didn't get paid overtime. Just my salary. It was a matter of pride in fixing a mistake that should never have happened.

Under this system we would have made the company look bad, possibly lose a major contract, and even if we hadn't been 'personally' affected by it...ie if the management had said 'hey don't worry about it'...the business still may have gone under and we would have lost our jobs....because we screwed up...

So instead we weren't restricted and we fixed the problem and the company kept the contract with no hiccups.

We need to protect those people who are being used as practical slave labor, or as debt slave, slaves to the company store, or whatever...but we can't prevent people from having free will either.

...it might be time for your company to make you partner or a manager-owner, at which point these rules probably wouldn't apply.

It doesn't sound like you've ever worked in a start up where the company losing a contract means you lose your job.

Say it's friday night...you've put in 47 and a half hours that week. You're the only one in a 10 person company who can do what you do, say some sort of tech issue...The company email server goes down...It'll take you 2 hours to get it set back up...

oh well too bad...gotta go home...bye...no email for the weekend...

for about $400 before hand.

There is almost always a backup option to any likely scenario. A good company plan will account for such situations. Only having one mail server with out a backup is a clear sign of a bad company plan, and if I were you I would resign since it's likely that kind of failure to plan ahead means the company is already doomed.

the employer to compensate the employee with paid time off.

In any event, if you're an employee whom your employer expects to work more than 50-90 hours a week on a consistent basis, that employee should have an equity stake in the company or partnership (ie, shouldn't be an employee), I think -- which would be a nice balance of interests, if you ask me.

And most interns love working 100+ hours per week.

I have been in positions where I have had to put in excessive hours for a few weeks to months, for what amounts to public policy reasons. So, I know there are legitimate circumstances. But most corporations are just overworking people for extra profit when they do this, as far as I can tell. Often, they are endangering the public.

A hard cap hurts more than it helps. It hurts government because it's another 'rule' with a million exeptions to legislate...

What's wrong with progressive overtime making it not cost efficient to overwork people?

Assuming that corporations would accept that idea. Certainly, making sure companies compensate people properly for additional hours (and by 90 hours in a week it ought to be triple time) would cut down on abuses. The tricky part would be dealing with management and professional occupations. Often professionals take a sort of perverse pride in not getting overtime pay e.g. computer professionals, academic researchers, government policy analysts, etc.

40 hours of time and a half is a beautiful thing on top of your straight time 40. I wouldn't want to work that every week of the year but I like when the opportunity comes up to do it for a few weeks in a row. It's well worth it.

Salespeople have to work longer hours at time to make their money. I use to be a Used Car Salesperson, and we would have to work 80 hours a week at times, because if they paid us for just the hours we worked (you got paid minimum wage for the hours worked if your commissions from Sales weren't more than what you would make hourly), it was our last paycheck. Did it suck to work that long with no guarantee? Did it suck to not have a life, and miss your family? Hell yeah. It was a cut throat business, but that was part of the job. I still look at it as one of the most life teaching professions I have ever had.

Dance mud turtles DANCE!

That where this article is from.

Waiters are paid by the hour and are union,
quit comparing our system that's broke to one that's working.

be brought in who are not already in. #2 - quality of work will increase, because anyone who's working too many hours (say, 60 or more) is doing lousy work anyway. (Yep, if you work 60 per week, that leaves 108 hoursfor everything else, including to sleep, 7x8=56, which leaves 52 hours for the commute, cleaning yourself up, household chores and what not, so if you commute 2 hours each day, that leaves 38 total hours per week for everything else!)

Don't want no sleep-deprived, non-hygienic stressed out weirdo doing anything for me, not medical, not the brakes on my car, not fixing my food, not teaching my kids, nuttin' honey.

Of course, there are always those who buy into the "indispensible" bullshit and the plaques for employee of the month and what not. No, thanks, I'll take cash and do my job well, and live life. "A cowboy is just a cowboy" and if anything happens which makes them want to change you out, they'll find somebody else and quick. (Unless you really are doing great work at seriously under your pay grade, and grooming the boss's poodle as well!)

If only our parties here in America would do that for their workers!!!

I simply don't know what is so awesome about this. The first thing that comes to my mind is this:

working an extra 10 - 15 hours a week and getting overtime for these additional hours pays a hell of a lot more than 10 - 15 hours straight time in a pissy job that you are working part time for.

Then add in the extra travel time and less flexibility of hours (probably adding a weekend day to the work week), and there is LESS family time, just to pay the bills.

What am I missing here????????????????????

:sarcasm: