HE LAST :HANCE
Page 41
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:XT WEDNESDAY at 10am about civil servants will assemble in the arlemagne building in Brussels. Like ry other EEC meeting this one will .t at least 15 minutes late thanks to little-known institution of the ommunity quarter of an hour". This Lot an excuse for bureaucratic sloth; ing this period delegates circulate, king hands and introducing
mselves to each other.
3ut next Wednesday's delegates will d no introduction; they already know h other very well indeed. For they the unfortunate men and women rged by the EEC Transport Ministers h negotiating the details of the isions to EEC Regulation 543/69. xt Wednesday's meeting will be at .t the 40th since the revision process seriously under way three years ago.
by now most of them are heartily : of the subject.
'his attitude does not stem from eaucratic indifference to the iortant issues they have been arguing ut. Far from it. Most of them see it Ln opportunity wasted as all their irs of discussion will not achieve the ;inal objective they were set by listers — a simpler and more flexible of rules.
tut whatever their solutions to the iils which remain to be worked out, . clear that when the revised rules le into force they will be much more iplicated than the present set.
)n the credit side, they will certainly :nore flexible. The ability to drive for to 10 hours a day, even within a htly shorter driving week, ought to welcome (for different reasons) to h employers and trade unions. And arrangements for daily rest periods remove the need for drivers to sleep he same place as they take their fling meal. They will now be able to Pt their rest patterns to their own hes as well as to the demands of the 'his increased flexibility has been Lght at an enormous cost in increased lplexity. And if the arrangements for ipensating the reduced daily rest .ods are as flexible as the British and iish governments are reported to it (CM, August 3) the complications be even greater.
wen worse, some of the changes which were initially welcome turn out, on closer examination, to be negated by other measures. Take, for example, the change back to the fixed week. This was one of the British operators' top priorities, since it would restore the flexibility over drivers' weekly rest periods which used to exist under the Transport Act.
The longed-for change in definition is among the measures so far agreed, but its value is almost totally wiped out by another provision which requires drivers to take a rest day after six days' driving. Until precise texts are made officially available to the public it is impossible to be sure of the effect. But from the papers I have seen it looks as though the industry will have to adapt to a change which will benefit no-one.
Next Wednesday's meeting will not attempt to remove these blemishes. The work done so far has mostly been blessed by transport ministers when they met in June. It is true that there is some disagreement about precisely what they did bless — by now this is almost traditional — but there is no disposition on anyone's part to reopen fundamental questions.
On the contrary, the unfortunate officials will be straining every.nerve to reach agreement on the outstanding details. They want to be able to present their political masters with an agreed package which the ministers can bless when they meet formally towards the end of the year. (Some will no doubt withold agreement on one or two minor matters to enable their ministers to trade them off for some other concessions, but that is a game that everyone — except perhaps the British — understands.) So on present form, after years of uncertainty, the industry must resign itself to new drivers' hours rules which will in some ways be worse than those they have now. That is the almost certain outcome. But is it also inevitable? I don't think so.
In June I suggested that some readers might think it preferable to leave the present rules unchanged rather than be saddled with "a hasty compromise cobbled together by ministers ignorant of, and bored with, the subject". That was intended to be ironical. But now I seriously wonder whether it would not be better to abandon the present negotiations and leave things as they are for a few more months.
For, once an amending regulation is adopted, no minister or Eurocrat is going to want to touch the subject again for years. To operators and drivers it may seem to be one of the most important pieces of legislation, with a fundamental and daily effect on the way they run their businesses. But politicians and civil servants, while not denying its importance, see it as a mass of detail totally devoid of the political glamour on which successful ministerial and official careers are founded. For better or worse the new regulations will stand for years before the next serious effort at the slow process of further amendment even begins, let alone ends.
Once again I ask, as I did in June, whether it is out of the question for European employers and trade unions to agree among themselves on the details, within the guidelines agreed by the ministers. Both would need to compromise, so neither side would get all that it wanted. But at least the compromises would be made between those directly affected by the legislation, and not by politicians and civil servants who inevitably do not always realise the full practical effect of what they are drafting.
The EEC legislative process makes no provision for further consultation at community level with the "social partners", as both sides of industry are known.
In the ordinary course of events national governments would simply seek the views of their own employers and trade unions before deciding whether individual changes should be supported or rejected.
But there is nothing to stop the International Road Transport Union's EEC Liaison Committee and its trade union equivalent from asking the Council of Ministers to hold back from legislating while the social partners undertook a joint examination of the final draft emerging from the civil servant negotiators. It would be surprising if this study did not reveal at least some changes on which the industry's representatives could agree. Even if these were minor they would be worth having.
And it is not impossible that, faced with the sort of complexities likely to emerge from next Wednesday's meeting, both sides might think it worthwhile abandoning some of their aims. For it will be their last chance for perhaps the next decade.
by Janus