What contractors need to know about the work time directive

UK contractors don’t want Brussels to tell them how many hours to work. UK contractors should fight like demons to keep Brussels from forcing us to adopt the work-time directive. Contractors will be the first loser.

Two recent surveys of contractors (most notably the survey by the JSA Group called “Contractor Expectations 2007”) both highlighted the same paradox: contractors don’t want to work such long hours, but they do not want the European Commission to decide how long their work week should be.

Both surveys showed that contractors, and IT professionals in general in the UK, resoundingly rejected the so-called “Work Time Directive,” the directive originally introduced by the European Commission in 1993 (although the UK took five years to make it into law) which tells all European workers when to knock off at the end of the week. The current directive — and these directives are implemented into law in all the 25 countries of the European Union — say that you only work 48 hours per week maximum. You have to take rest breaks when your day is longer than 11 hours, and you have to take one day off each week.

Last week the French were at it again at the Commission, pushing to make us all work fewer hours (so that we can be like the French, of course, and not more competitive than they are).

How Long Should We Work?

Now, stop smiling. Of course we all pay only limited attention at all to these legal restrictions, and certainly we know that much of our depends on our ignoring them. Contractors, in particular, are always the ones in the office when everyone else has gone home, and the ones who wind up online late Saturday night and early Sunday morning. That’s how deadlines get achieved.

And, even if you didn’t already do it in practice, you can legally opt out of the work time laws. This indeed happens mostly in the UK. Theoretically, many employers agree since you are not supposed to provide your best performance if you work too long hours. The UK has long fought to retain this ‘opt out’ privilege, and it won an important battle in Brussels last November when the French once again tried to make us give it up.

European Pressure

Anyway, Europe wants us to give up our right to ‘opt out.’ The Labour government is resisting this move, and contractors should certainly support them as much as possible in this matter. “European leaders are a bit tired of the UK’s always taking an exceptional position in EU matters,” explains Alasdair Geater, a lawyers and an expert on European Union affairs based in Brussels. “Sooner or later, they will legislate in force to remove this right.”

But contractors in the UK should fight like demons to protect the opt out privilege, Geater says.

“The reason why the French and all the rest don’t want the UK to have this privilege is because it gives us a huge competitive advantage, “ Geater (who was born outside Glasgow) points out. “Because UK business can keep its good people working longer, we keep our service costs lower than elsewhere in Europe—outside of the former Eastern Europe, contracting costs average 7-10% higher in Continental Europe (one has to average out the value of the euro/pound currency pair to obtain this statistic, but it is real). The French and the Dutch are well aware of this, and they want us Brits to change our ways and raise our costs.”

As we’ve said: contractors are going to work these longer hours anyway. Sometimes with overtime rates, but often without them. Obviously, the companies we contractors work for use our services knowing that they can count on us to work the long hours, and to get the job done.

So if the UK loses the opt-out option for the Work Time directive, the first people who will feel its effects will be us contractors. Let’s stay really British on this one.