A Recalcitrant Partner: The UK Reaction to the Working Time Directive

New Labour and work-time regulation: a Marxian analysis of the UK economy

“…Prior to this, limits on working time had been resisted by the Thatcher and Major Conservative administrations, committed as they were to flexible labour markets as a key plank in their pro-capitalist supply-side economic policies. Indeed, the Major government went so far as to challenge the legal basis for Working Time Directive as a health and safety measure at the European Court of Justice, since this designation meant that its passage was subject to majority voting rather than unanimity in the European Council and therefore difficult to resist (Gray, 1997).…”

Informal Governance in the European Union

“…The draft Working Time Directive provided for regulations on minimum daily, weekly, and yearly rest periods as well as on night and shift work, and it also proposed a centralized statutory regulation even though these aspects were in most countries subject to sectoral collective bargains between the social partners (Falkner et al 2005, 100). Thus, while redundant in many member states with similar or even more stringent collective or statutory regulation in force, this proposal promised to require adjustments in other countries, particularly in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which had no regulations at all (Gray 1998). …”