Working Time Directive
The current approaches to Employee Relations in relation to working time regulations between France and the UK.
The most controversial EU measure in the area of health
and safety has been the Working time Directive 1993 .The
effect of this directive lead to the Working Time Regulations
in UK in 1998 .The regulations introduce a range of significant
new rights and entitlements, such as minimum four weeks
paid annual leave. There is significant scope in the regulations
for employees and employers to enter into agreements ion
how the working time rules will apply in their own particular
circumstances Collective agreements can be made with workers
who are not covered by the collective bargain etc and created
a new chapter in the development of the employment conditions
across Europe including France and UK and changes in the
legislations controlling the Hours of Work has been one
of the cornerstones in this process.
Hours of Work Policy & Regulations in UK
A summary of the main features of working-time practices
in the UK
State policies, economic conditions and collective agreements
influence actual and preferred working hours. These institutions
are shaping the current re-organisation and intensification
of working-time that can be observed to a greater or lesser
degree across Europe (Bosch et al. 1994, European Foundation
1998a, 1998b, Rubery et al. 1995). These policies, and the
workplace practices which develop within this context, shape
the number of hours that people work, which parts of the
day, week and year their employment is concentrated in,
and the degrees of variability, unpredictability, and autonomy
in their work schedules.
The relationship between actual and preferred working hours
is two-way. Working-time preferences influence actual hours
through their influence on job search and employment decisions
and plans, through individual and collective negotiation
of working-time at the workplace, and through their contribution
to broader political debates about the organisation and
use of time in society. Implicit in all of these processes
is the fact that working-time preferences may not be realised
due to the competing objectives and constraints that also
shape the working-time practices that result. In turn constraints
and context shape preferences. Preferences can change if
economic conditions, workplace innovations or policy interventions
alter the context men and women find themselves in, and
their evaluations of their current experiences and the alternatives
that they consider are open to them.
Working-time legislation and collective agreements
Until very recently a distinctive feature of UK labour law
was that there was no general legislation regulating working
time or guaranteeing minimum rest periods or annual leave
entitlements. There were restrictions on working time in
some occupations where there is a threat to safety, such
as in transport. However, junior doctors work some of the
longest hours in the UK but there was no limit until the
early 1990s when a limited guideline (72 hours per week)
was introduced into the National Health Service. The only
general legal requirement was that all employees had the
right to receive a written contract within two months of
starting their employment which specifies the terms and
conditions relating to hours of work and holiday entitlement,
and the duration of the contract if it is fixed-term (1978
Employment Protection (consolidation) Act, replaced by the
1993 Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act) (Hepple
and Hakim (1997).
Developments in working-time regulations in the 1980s and
early 1990s
In the 1980s and early 1990s the statutory regulations that
had offered protection to some groups of workers was dismantled
(Hepple and Hakim 1997). Limited regulations fixed maximum
hours and paid holidays for certain sectors (mainly retailing,
catering, hairdressing and clothing manufacturing) were
set by the 1979 Wage Councils Act (replacing earlier legislation
dating back to 1909). The coverage and regulations were
reduced in the 1986 Wages Act and the wage councils were
abolished altogether (with the exception of agriculture)
in the 1993 Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act.
Legislation relating to women's working hours in manufacturing
industry, including night work were removed in the 1986
Sex Discrimination Act and the 1989 Employment Act. The
1989 Employment Act also removed a number of restrictions
on the hours worked by those between the minimum school-leaving
age (16 years) and 18 years. Sunday working in retail had
been limited by legislation which restricted the opening
hours of shops, but this was repealed by the Sunday Trading
Act (1993).
Regulations on the number of hours worked:
The 1998 Working Time Regulations Act implemented the EU
Working Time Directive, introducing the first complete legislation
in the UK on working time and annual leave entitlements.
This introduced the following provisions established in
the Directive:
" 3 weeks paid leave, which can not be cashed in (4
weeks since 1999)
" Daily and weekly rest periods (rest period after
6 hours, 11 hours rest in each 24 hour period, one day off
in seven)
" Maximum 48 hour week
" Average of 8 hours on night work.
The Directive permitted various derogations and exemptions
that have limited its coverage (transport workers, seafarers,
junior doctors in training, and managers and professionals
whose working time is 'not measured or predetermined' and
are thus considered to determine their own hours). The Directive
also permitted 'voluntary opt-out' agreements between employers'
and employees. A new Directive extending the Working Time
Directive to cover transport workers, sea farers and junior
doctors was agreed in May 2000 (EIROnline 2000a), which
the UK government will be obliged to implement in due course.
Despite the incomplete coverage and limited ceiling on working
hours this piece of legislation has still been important
for having introduced national working-time regulations
into the UK. One important aspect has been the introduction
of the statutory entitlement to annual leave. The normal
entitlement to annual leave established in collective bargaining
was four and a half weeks, but a large minority of the workforce
did not have this entitlement, primarily part-timers and
full-time manual employees (Fagan 1997:94). It is estimated
that around 10% of the workforce have gained from the introduction
of a statutory entitlement to annual leave (IDS 1996).
The introduction of the Working Time Directive was resisted
by the then Conservative government and was also fiercely
opposed by many employers, which is the usual response in
the UK to the development of European level regulations.
This piece of legislation is still a matter for debate between
the current Labour government and the social partners. Those
employees covered by collective agreements have always had
their 'normal' hours regulated through bargaining, and some
reductions in working-time have been negotiated in recent
years. The engineering union has traditionally been the
pace-setter in working time reductions in the UK and initiated
industrial action in 1989 which culminated in a series of
agreements which established a 37.5 hour week for many engineering
workers by the early 1990s (Richardson and Rubin 1994).
Another important example is the 1997 'single status' agreement
which reduced the normal weekly hours for manual employees
in the public sector from 39 to 37 to harmonise their normal
hours with non-manual public sector employees, and which
came into effect on April 1st 1999. The 37-hour week in
the public sector is lower than the norm set in some parts
of the private sector, but not all. For example, a 35-hour
week is the collectively agreed norm in the banking sector,
which is one of the private sectors that have a reasonably
highly level of collective organisation (EIROnline 2000b).
By 1999, the average collectively agreed normal weekly working
hours were 38.4 hours per week in the UK, which is close
to the average set in most EU member states (EIROnline 2000b).
However, few collective agreements set explicit limits on
the amount of permitted overtime for the union movement
in UK has traditionally focused upon using reductions in
basic hours combined with negotiating better rewards for
overtime as a means of raising wages (Rubery et al. 1994).
Regular and extensive paid and unpaid overtime in the UK
means that actual or usual working hours typically exceed
contractual normal hours (see Marsh 1991, Harkness 1999).
Very long basic or total hours will be curtailed somewhat
with the 48 hour ceiling established by the Working Time
Directive, although the enforcement of this regulation will
be more difficult in the non-unionised parts of the economy.
Hours of Work Policy & Regulations in France
In view of other countries, France appears as a country where working time issues are regulated mainly by law.The successive presence of the socialist government has made things quite eay in France for the introduction of the Hours of Work and the flexibility along with it . It is also necessary to stress the fact that the main evolutions concerning the regulation of working time, particularly those concerning working time reduction, have occured during and after the survey undertook by the Euro foundation . The first Aubry law has been passed in the parliament on the 13 of june 1998. Moreover, this law wanted to indicate orientations, leaving to the social partners the task of giving life to them, while the regulation in itself has appeared with the second Aubry law (january 2 000,the 19th.)
The process of law and negociation in France
Between 1982 and 2 000, around seven laws dealing with working time issues have been introduced in France showing the effort and the policies of the french governments towards the work related environments and considering it as a health and safety issue . From the middle of the 80', the search for a greater productive efficiency has been prevalent in the working time policies either through legislation which gave more room for working time arrangements at the firm level as through the implementation of such arrangements in firms. The two Aubry laws (1998 and 2000) could be considered as the pinnacle of all these legal developments which have occurred during nearly 20 years : the new legislation try to combine the search for an impact on unemployment as well as on the firm's efficiency through combining working time reduction and working time reorganisation. The first Aubry law has associated evolution of the reduction of the legal working week from 39 hours a week to 35 hours a week and that should be implemented from the 1st of january 2000, and social and organisational innovation through incentives given to the social partners in order to negotiate agreements which may depart from the current legislation and consequently influence the future legislation (for instance concerning the way to account professionnal and managerial staff's working time or how to count up working time, e.g on a weekly, annual or, even, a pluri annual basis etc.)
The changing role of the law : From the work sharing issue to working time organization
Successive socialist governments added a series of arrangements
aiming at the reduction of working hours at the company's
level to the existing legislative frame in order to promote
their policy of work sharing and reduction of the unemployment
rates in this fashion ,some of these did not succeed as
the rules were too many for the usefullness of the corporates
in France . This was the case for the so called
"contracts of solidarity" in 1982 that were intended
to encourage firms to reduce working hours and to hire additional
staff or at least to maintain the level of employment by
offering them exemptions from certain social contributions
and premium. Others fared better, such as the contractual
arrangements which encouraged early retirement of employees
aged 55 and over, then taking on the young unemployed to
compensate for these retirements, in order to avoid the
prospect of several million unemployed. The overall results
achieved were disappointing on the whole, and from 1984
the tone of the discourse altered. In a context of continuously
increasing unemployment, any improvement in the employment
situation was seen to depend on an improvement in the competitiveness
of companies, to be acquired through greater flexibility.
The Delabarre law dated 28 February 1986 amended the edict
of January 1982 in this direction, and specified that branch
agreements should provide companies with the ability to
modulate working hours in return for an overall reduction
of working time5. Following a change in the parliamentary
majority, the Seguin law dated 19 June 1987 added even greater
flexibility into work-time legislation, representing a significant
liberal swing. In particular, it gave companies and units
the option to reach working time agreements without waiting
for the prior branch agreements which would
formerly have given them this authority. The law also authorised
abandonment of the obligation to reduce working hours wherever
work
schedules were submitted to variations. In summary, the
Seguin law
sanctioned a break in the link between the reduction and
the organization of working hours, the first now being no
more than one of the possible counterparts of the second.
The final significant act in the area was of flexibility
regulation was the Loi Quinquennale of 1993. Among others,
this law looks at the development of part-time work and
the annualisation of this type of employment pattern (part-time
work is no longer calculated as previously on a weekly basis,
but on a yearly basis). The law also provides a new scheme
for short-time working and unprecedented options for departure
from Sunday working principles, and so on. These original
measures are aimed, not at sharing the available working
hours, but at making their use more flexible.
A trend toward decentralised collective bargaining
which has been increasingly focused on work-time flexibility
and which now tend to match employment issues and productive
efficiency.By promoting new forms of regulation of working
hours over the last fiteen years, the French government
seeks to delegate to the employer's organizations and to
the unions the task to negociate and to define the new working
time standards. What have been the results of such a strategy?
In spite of an interprofessional agreement (29 March 1989)
which was in line with the Seguin law (1987) and which stressed
the role of the sectorial level as the favoured forum for
working time bargaining, the results were very thin. Between
1983 and 1987, only three significant agreements were concluded
(public works, the dairy industry and metal industry). Although
the 1987 law and the 1989 agreement were looking at the
development of the bargaining process, the theme of working
hours has remained secondary, and has shown no sign of intensifying.
In 1993, only 53 endorsements or agreements dealt with organization of working hours, 36
of which were of a national dimension. Negotiations, when
they actually took place, were dealing mainly with arrangements
of working hours such as time modulation or part-time working.
The 31 october 1995 national agreement concluded in order
to encourage the different sectors to conclude agreements
linking working time reduction and working time reorganization
has also failed insofar as only about 40 agreements (among
128 industries concerned) have been signed. Moreover, the
scope of these agreeements was thin as far as the working
time reduction is concerned. In companies on the other hand,
the contractual dynamic was far more vigorous. In general,
the last fifteen years have been marked in France by a large
increase in the number of company agreements. Until 1995,
an average of 2500 agreements related to working hours,
and these were almost exclusively concluded in large companies
and concerned mainly the working time organisation. In 1993
for example, agreements on the organization of working hours
represented exactly 44.2% of all company agreements. If
one leaves out a few compromises which were included with
the aim of safeguarding jobs (negotiation of reduced working
hours with no compensation in terms of wages), the agreements
negotiated in 1993 are very representative of the trends
during that period. Half of the agreements cover the organization
of working hours in a wide range of diverse forms, such
as modulation of hours, part-time working, flexitime, compensatory
time off, operating time, shiftwork, week-end shifts, night
work for women, etc. But it was practically impossible to
find agreements about the reduction of working hours. Since
1996 onwards, important changes have occured as we have
mentionned earlier : the number of agreements concerning
working time reduction increased in a large proportion,
firstly as a result of the Loi Robien and secondly in the
frame of the Aubry laws process (200 in 1995 ; 2000 in 1997
as a result of the Robien law and 19000 in 1999: Eurofound.Eu.int
: Working Papers on France ).
Comparison:
There are a lot of similarities & dissimilarities among
the patterns in the 'Hours of Work' has changed in UK and
in France .The main similarities come from the fact that
the movements and the legislations in both the countries
started at the same time for this cause .The difference
is in the approach .In France successive socialist governments
have been too proactive in introducing the laws about reduces
and flexible working hours whereas the conservative governments
in UK are initially opposed to the process of flexibility
and reduced work hours .The best example of that came during
the protest launched by the British government in 1993 against
considering the Hours of Work to be a health and safety
issue (Gennard et al 1999 Page 106 ). Introduction of the
Employer's Associations has lead to a better environment
of collective bargaining as found by Marchington et al 1996(as
cited in Gennard et al page 112) and created an environment
of collective nature in the issue of the Hours of Work in
the countries. The legislations in France have been quite
continuous towards the improvement of the Hours of Work
issue with continuous amendments but in UK the process has
faced several obstacles and making some progress since the
introduction of the Hours of Work in the Maastricht treaty
.the new governments in UK is following right path at this
time, but more political agreement is required to make it
a success.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gennard J and Judge G. Employee Relations (2nd ed) IPD publications 2000
Marchington M and Goodman J, New Developments in Employee involvement, Dept of employment, 1992
Bosch G., Dawkins, P., and Michon, F. (1994)
Times are Changing: Working Time in 14 Industrialised Countries,
Geneva: Institute for International Labour Studies (ILO).
EIRO (2000a) 'Extension of working time Directive agreed'
EIROnline, May http://eiro.eurfound.ie/2000/05
EIRO (2000b) 'Working-time developments - annual update
1999' EIROnline February. http://eiro.eurfound.ie/2000/02
Ezard, J. (2000) 'UK's work burden grows fastest in Europe'
The Guardian, June 21st, p 7. http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk
Fagan, C. (1997) Absent men and juggling women: gender,
households and working-time schedules in Britain. Unpiblished
doctoral thesis. University of Manchester, UK.
Harkness, S. (1999)'Working 9 to 5?' in P. Gregg and J.
Wadsworth, op cit.
Hepple, B., and Hakim, C. (1997) 'United Kingdom' in European
Foundation (1997) Legal and Contractual Limitations to Working
Time in the European Union. Luxembourg: Office for Official
Publications of the European Communities.
IDS (1996) Employment Europe, issue 413, May.
Marsh, C. (1991) Hours of Work of Women and Men in Britain
London: HMSO.
Martin, J. and Roberts, C. (1984) Women and Employment:
a Lifetime Perspective, London: HMSO.
Rubery, J., Deakin, S., and Horrel, S. (1994) 'The United
Kingdom' in Bosch et al. op cit.
Rubery, J., Fagan, C., and Smith, M. (1995) 'Changing Patterns
of Work and Working-Time in the European Union and the impact
of Gender Divisions', V/6203/95-EN Brussels: European Commission
(DGV).
http://www.eurofound.eu.int/working/options.
Paul Bouffartigue1 and Jacques Bouteiller :Is the working
time of managerial staff a clockable bargaining issue?
http://www.univ- aix.fr/lest/lespublications/contributionsadesouvrages/2001/bouff/bouffis.pdf
Legal Notice - None of our work is to be passed off as your own or as anyone else's, nor is it to be reproduced either in whole or in part. This a breach of copyright. It also constitutes plagiarism and will breach University Regulations, consult your guidelines if you are unsure. If we suspect that any law essays or materials are being used for such purposes then we will refuse to carry out that work and all future essay work for the person involved.
Refund Policy : Law Essays UK has a strict no refund policy due to the highly specialised and individual nature of the services we provide. Our services are provided as is, and accordingly the customer orders on their own initiative. However, for your peace of mind, we guarantee that if you are not satisfied with an essay, for whatever reason, then we can amend it accordingly to your specifications. In addition, under our crystal clear guarantee, we will clarify anything contained within an essay or study material free of charge
Note: We offer a wholly independent law and legal research service. We are not affiliated with the Bar Council or any other organisation in any other way. Nor are they affiliated with us. We regret that we are unable to take on work from members of the public and businesses outside of doing model answers as law essays, legal essays, research and tutoring as to do so would contravene Bar Council regulations. All research services and materials offered are subject to availability. 5 day completion for law essays of 5,000 words or less only. All services are subject to availability. All trademarks and copyrights of other bodies and organisations are recognised and respected.
Visitors have also looked at...
1Law Essay Scams
Essay writing scams can be hard to spot.
Click here to find out how to avoid the essay scams2Essay writing in the press
Find out what the press say about essay writing in the 21st century.
3 Meet the Law Essays UK Team
Find out more about the individuals that provide this first class essay writing service.
