No rest for the British

Longest average working week in Europe 3.3 million work more than 50 hours a week No right to paid holiday

Dominic Oliver, 36, has just finished a stretch of seasonal work in an Oxfordshire dairy's orange-juice processing plant, working 60 hours a week. "Everyone's on 13-hour shifts because the dairy went into overdrive for summer production. There's no choice about the overtime: the basic shift starts at six in the morning and is nine hours long, but if you refused to do the extra four they'd give you the sack: there are plenty of other people who'll do it."

Like most factory workers, Dominic's function was to perform a mechanically repetitive task: "All the production line jobs are really monotonous. I was putting the caps on bottles, six caps every five seconds or so, and you have to keep up with the machine: it's mentally rather than physically exhausting and the last two hours are murder. You just shut your mind off. The long hours do affect people's ability to work safely: pallets get stacked carelessly and collapse, that kind of thing. It's just relentless because one week you're on nights, the next you're moved to days, depending on how production is going. The changeover in your body clock is totally unmanageable.

"Depression is a big thing. The only solace the staff get is from seeing

yuppies drinking this stuff that's supposed to be top-grade quality orange juice, and knowing that Pervy Pete has had his dirty hands in the vat."

Dominic was lucky in that he was employed directly by the dairy: other casual workers sent by a temp agency, were (after its deductions) taking home around pounds 100 a week. He is by no means unusual: nearly one in five of British workers now puts in weeks of more than 50 hours.

Dominic and those like him could be rescued from this servitude by the European Union (EU) directive on working time. But Britain alone in Europe is determined to resist it. In a matter of weeks the European Court of Justice will rule on Britain's right to overwork. Already, Tory MPs and the press are gearing up for a new round of anti-Brussels, sub-Churchillian, we'll-fight-them-on-the-beaches rhetoric.

FOR 30 years after the end of the Second World War the British regarded work as a four-letter word. The Germans went back to their lathes after the conflict, the Dutch made giant leaps in industrial reconstruction and the French exported to the world. After the blood, sweat and tears of the war, Britons seemed to award themselves a rest. Over much of the last two decades, however, under the slogan of "management's right to manage", we have become the workaholics of Europe. Britons spend far more hours in the office and the factory than their Continental neighbours.

This work ethic has affected not only manual workers, but higher-paid white-collar and professional staff. Kenneth Clarke, our laid-back Chancellor of the Exchequer, was appalled at the "long-hours culture" he discovered when he moved to the Treasury. Highly intelligent civil servants would apparently compete with each other over how late they could stay in order to win the approval of their seniors. In the end, partly in response to a feminist lobby seeking to increase the promotional chances of working mothers, he issued strict deadlines for work to be completed. His civil servants were encouraged to go home when they finished their work.

Throughout industry, however, the long-hours culture has tightened its grip. The number of British workers putting in weeks of more than 50 hours has grown by a third.

At an average 43.1 hours the working week in the UK is the highest in the EU. According to the TUC even this understates the position because the British workforce has a disproportionate number of part-time jobs involving minimal working hours, which brings the average down.

So, while working hours on the Continent have been retreating, in Britain there has been a steady growth. Between 1983 and 1991 the average working week for full-time employees in the service sector went up from 41.9 hours to 43.1 hours, but fell from 40.3 to 40 hours in the rest of Europe.

Now, according to Eurostat, the Luxembourg-based statistical office, 28 per cent of all full-time employees work 46 hours or more in the UK, compared with an EU average of 11 per cent. The gap for male full-time workers is even greater - 36 per cent in the UK and 14 per cent in the EU.

The Government appears determined to protect this British pre-eminence from Brussels interference, thus preserving, it argues, Britain's world competitiveness. "No" to the 48-hour maximum working week has become the rallying cry of Europhobes.

Before the next parliament the full European Court of Justice will rule on Britain's case for remaining the sweatshop of Europe, after an interim opinion in March from Philippe Leger, the advocate general of the court, rejected Britain's claim that forcing through any new law on working time would be unconstitutional. The directive provides (with many exceptions) for a maximum 48-hour working week, rest breaks after six consecutive hours, four weeks' annual holiday, a maximum eight-hour average shift for night work, and at least one day off a week.

Britain faces almost certain defeat. Despite all the anti-Brussels posturing to appease the Eurosceptics desperate to demonise European social policy, the European Court and all its works; despite the encouraging headlines ("Time the European nanny retired" and "Sneaky Brussels cheated to cut working hours"), Britain has painted itself into a corner.

There is quiet smugness in Brussels. All the legal advice backs the advocate general's March opinion. The legal services of the European Comm- ission, the EU council of ministers and every member state have advised that Brussels was right to insist that Britain was covered by the working hours directive on health and safety grounds.

Britain argues that by basing the directive on health and safety grounds, the Commission has denied it the chance to wield its much-vaunted veto over social measures - agreed at the 1990 signing of the Maastricht treaty.

But there is bitterness that Britain should conduct the Conservative Party's internal power struggle over Europe on the issue of the working time directive. "This is not about working hours. It's about British politics," commented one senior official in Brussels.This, after all, was the directive on which Britain secured so many concessions that it became known as the "Swiss cheese directive" because it was so full of holes. David Hunt, employment secretary when the measure was approved in June 1993, even boasted at the time: "The teeth have been drawn from the original proposal." In what is usually a sign of acquiesence in EU council votes, he abstained during the final roll-call.

One EU official who worked on the dossier in the run-up to the agreement in June 1993 recalls how Britain "negotiated down to the wire" to secure derogations, opt-outs and exemptions. Drafts and redrafts passed between the capitals in a frenzy of haggling and when it was all over Britain had secured virtually all of its key concerns.

The drafters of the legislation had good reason to be dispirited as they left Luxembourg that day. Plans to make Sunday a mandatory day of rest had been dropped. Agreements to circumvent the legislation could now be reached between boss and worker or between management and unions. The 48-hour limit would be set as the average over any four-month period to take account of seasonal industries. And, crucially, up to at least 2003, the directive would be voluntary. If a worker chose to put in 70 hours he or she could. Even over the basic rights first written into the directive - a rest period of 11 consecutive hours per day, a limit of on average eight hours on night shifts; a guarantee of at least one day off per week, and four weeks' paid annual leave - there is scope to negotiate detail, for example on the length of daily breaks. And the four-week holiday requirement does not have to come into play until the end of the century.

What the measure does still provide is a legal safeguard against dismissal for an employee who feels pressurised into Dickensian work patterns. Recalling how Italian coalminers in Belgium in the early part of this century used to be jailed for refusing to put in slave hours, the EU commissioner for social affairs, Padraig Flynn, comments: "In this day and age that seems to be a fairly fundamental human right."

Other safeguards stitched into the law give night workers the right to ask for a day job if they run into health problems, and employers must keep records on staff who exceed 48 hours a week to guard against abuse.

Counterbalancing these hardly overgenerous rights is a long list of workers who are not merely exempt from parts of the law, but, thanks to Britain's negotiating zeal, totally excluded. They include lorry drivers, train drivers and all other transport workers; sea fishermen and any other workers at sea, for example those who work on oil-rigs. Junior doctors, whose long hours are legendary, are also - again at Britain's insistence - barred from the scope of the law.

Then there are let-out clauses for employees whose working hours cannot be measured, people like managing directors of companies, priests, or members of a family business , and further let-out clauses for workers in industries requiring continuous service such as post and telecommunications, fire services, docks, airports, gas and electricity, farming, tourism, hospitals, prisons and the media. For these categories "compensatory rest" or "appropriate protection" can replace legal entitlement.

It is true, that in the few remaining industries where the new directive would apply - the catering and retail sectors for example - the directive could have more of an impact in the UK than elsewhere, simply because these are the areas where people systematically work more than 48 hours a week. On average only 7 per cent of workers in the EU work more than 48 hours. In Britain more than 20 per cent do.

BRITAIN's resistance is met with genuine bewilderment in Europe. Whatever the individual country views on Britain's Maastricht treaty opt-out on social policy, the Commission argues that the working time directive was tabled long before Maastricht and long before the social chapter was negotiated.

And Britain may have bitten off more than it can chew. For all its tough talk of obstructing any move by the European Court of Justice, it must recall that an unrelated ruling earlier this year established for the first time that citizens can sue their governments for retroactive damages if they can show that a government's failure to implement EU legislation caused injury or loss.

And British workers, whose average working week of 43 hours is the longest in Europe, may even end up with a more liberal interpretation of the directive. Giving his interim judgment on Britain's position, Mr Leger said that Article 118a, the disputed treaty article on which the working hours law is based, should encompass in its scope the general well-being of the worker and not just obvious health risks like backbreaking loads or close contact with dangerous chemicals. "Health is not just a state of physical well-being; it is mental and social, and does not consist of just being free of sickness or infirmity," he said.

If the full court follows his reasoning, Britain's crusade against Brussels "interference" could clear the way for a dramatic widening of the EU's health and safety provisions. As one Brussels official put it: "Britain may have given us a whole new interpretation of health and safety on which to base new proposals from which Britain cannot opt out. This could be a real hornets' nest."