Gordon Brown’s crusade against regulation isn’t going to be an easy one. Just as the applause lauding his embrace of the Better Regulation Task Force report and the Hampton Review starts to fade, he has to fend off evil Strasbourg, where nasty MEPs have threatened to take away the opt-out from the 48 hour-week provision of the Working Time directive.

By Tom Blass, BusinessZone Editor

The opt-out (known as the ‘sweatshop owners’ charter to some) has become a symbol to others of British industry, endeavour and downright balls, flying audaciously in the face of lily-livered and invidious Eurocrats. And so Gordon, like a latter day Nelson, must face the hydra-headed hell of hundreds of faceless ‘mini-Napoleons.’

If stern words at dawn are required, Brown has many willing seconds. Earlier this week, Confederation of British Industry (CBI) director John Cridland told a meeting, that though Brown’s insistence that he would challenge the 48 hour limit was encouraging, the vote itself was disastrous and showed that the UK was still some way from convincing European policy makers that labour markets must be flexible.

He continued, “By maintaining the old fashioned approach to job protection, some members of the European parliament and the European Commission are not only damning their own economies to stagnation, but are seeking to deprive the UK of the benefits of its workplace flexibility.”

A spokesperson for the CBI told sister site AccountingWEB that those industries worst affected would most likely be the hospitality, leisure, and tourism industries, where, especially on a seasonal basis, staff are often required or wish to work longer than usual hours. But it could also be problematic for those in the financial services, banking and legal industries, where he said, “People go into those professions fully expecting to have to work long hours.”

The experience of Christine Hogg, a director of Cams Fire and Security in Stevenage, shows how unpredictable an effect on particular industries ending the opt-out could be. Cams Fire and Security installs and attends to fire and burglar alarms, and relies in large part on the 24-hour availability of staff on a call-out basis. She says, “Take a thunderstorm for example. That’s what sets them all off. We’d need a lot of staff to cover them.”

School holidays place extra demand on the industry, because that’s when all the schools want the work done,she says. The situation is made worse by a rapid increase in the number of ‘thunderflies’ [little midges] in July and August, which are small enough to get into the units and set off the passive infrared movement detectors.

Hogg says that there’s a shortage of qualified engineers, and that labour prices are correspondingly high. She told AccountingWEB that if Brown fails to ward off the creep of European stagnation, her business will be forced to employ an extra four staff at £25,000 a pop, and increase prices by 5% accordingly.

Ironically, France and Spain both use opt-out agreements for the health industry, realising that were they not to, many medical staff, including doctors on call, would be in breach of the Working Time Directive – this suggests that it is possible that the compromise eventually reached by Europe is that the opt-out goes, with the caveat that it will still apply to employees “on call.”

Certainly it is well known that many workers, even in highly-paid professions such as corporate law, work longer hours than is good for them mentally, physically or socially, and do so fearing that to do otherwise would jeopardise career prospects. At the other end of the scale there are workers in the hospitality and leisure industries, which are often poorly-paid and have high turnover rates, who feel coerced into working longer and more unpredictable hours than they would otherwise want to.

A spokesperson for the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) said that to date, no study had been undertaken to estimate the financial burden that an end to the opt-out would bring to businesses in any sector. He accepted that the “workers’ choice” could be seen as disingenuous, and that, if the opt-out were retained, it might be desirable to have legislation ensuring that employers were not abusing their right to ask workers to accept overtime.

But wouldn’t this somehow be robbing Peter to pay Paul?