Brussels, 26/08/2004 (Agence Europe) - At the time of animated debate on the 40 hour working week in Europe, John Monks, Secretary General of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) has described the call for increased working hours as "opportunist" and that a working week of forty hours was not what Europe needed.
In a declaration Monks added that it was strange to see opponents to the practice of branch collective agreements are the same people today who were calling on all companies in Europe to introduce measures that would provide relief to two or three companies. He explained that Europe did not need longer working weeks but needed to work more intelligently. The Secretary General said that a general increase in weekly working hours would not resolve the jobs problem in Europe but would rather make it worse. Monks explained that if it was not accompanied by a 15% increase in demand, a 15% increase in working hours would threaten one in seven jobs. The Secretary General said that it was therefore difficult to see where this 15% in European demand would come from and averred that the final result would be low growth, without job creation and an economy that was on the edge of inflation. He warned that the ETUC would counter-attack this "perverse offensive" in order to defend the gains of workers won over recent decades: that of lower hours. To this end, the Confederation will be informing its affiliates of the exact content of company agreements in question and the ETUC's committee for collective negotiations in Europe will discuss the issue in September.