UKIP East Midlands
Derek Clark goes WTD
Friday, 23rd January 2009
As it is the start of the Czech Presidency their Vice President and Labour Minister addressed the committee on Tuesday. He said that they would be emphasising several issues. He started with the Working Time Directive which is not dead, nor yet alive!
Apparently 15 member states out of the 27 have signed to say they want opt-outs to continue! Its not just the UK! He supported the right of workers to do overtime. He said the problem is that the WTD is inflexible. Ways of life have moved on, real life prevails so the WTD is obsolete, hence constant re-drafting. And that, of course, is the whole problem with the EU.
He went on to the Free Movement of Workers principle. Well, the Staythorpe power station near Newark has just come up. New gas fired power station being built by French firm Total by importing foreign workers who will, of course, be paid less than the minimum wage. This brings us back to a commentary of nearly a year ago, the Laval case.
To remind you, that was a Swedish construction firm employing Latvians on a collective agreement at less than Swedish minimum wage. Firm taken to the ECJ who found in their favour, which means a cart and horse through the legal minimum wage. Same thing with the Viking Line, a construction project in Lower Saxony and transport workers in Luxembourg. All now endorsed by the ECJ whose rulings can not be appealed!
So I asked this question,-
" Would the vice President care to comment on the four or five events which have occurred in the last two years and of which I am sure he is aware. I refer to cases in western European countries where companies have employed work forces mainly from Eastern Europe by way of collective agreements. In these agreements the work force is paid less than that national minimum wage but more than they would have got at home. In each case the European Court of Justice has upheld the companies thus driving a cart and horses through the minimum wage policies of those countries. That is, they have overturned national Acts of Parliament. It is also the case that minimum wages were introduced to protect workers from exploitation; how does it protect if the workers find they have no job at all?"
I got no answer
The President of the Committee had used the usual technique to allow side-tracking by asking the Czech Vice president to answer all 16 questions together. He answered many other points, especially on the Working Time Directive. Other members had asked about the free movement of workers but none were specific and none were like mmmine. He gave a bland resume of free movement and ignored my question entirely.
At least the letters I wrote to the local media, and the Sun and the Mail, bore fruit. Don turned them into a press release resulting in a five minute plus interview with Will Green of Smooth radio, which goes out all over the East Mids. Another radio station may well take it up.
I now confess. I have gone native and promised, well half promised, to support a report! That was in the debate on Multilingualism, which they are promoting to enable people to communicate across language barriers. A rail crash in Belgium occurred partly because one train driver spoke only French, the other only Dutch, not good.
But it went wider into the preservation of minor languages generally. I supported that in terms of the preservation of local heritage and ways of life, ie a UKIP outlook.
For me it was fascinating for the German vice president of the committee to remark that all children in Germany had to know German before they could start at school. This I warmly endorsed, saying that I wished our government would do the same. I had no shame in telling committee that we had schools where there were 20 or more languages in the one class.
