Don’t let the Brits work so much

European Union

Welcome to the “Socialist empire of Europe,” said the London Sun in an editorial. The European Parliament voted last week to force Britain to limit its working hours to a maximum of 48 a week, like other E.U. countries. Evidently it’s distressing to the loafers in France to see Britain’s economy outperform theirs year after year. Our flexible labor market has given us some of the highest growth and lowest unemployment rates in the E.U. But rather than rise to our level, the French want to drag us down to theirs. They think they can protect their “feather-bedded, welfare-cushioned, work-as-you-please culture” by “making hard work illegal.” The result, of course, will be to drag Britain into the swamp of bankruptcy that is drowning much of the rest of Europe. “Dictating how many hours we can work, and therefore how much we can earn, is a monstrous intrusion on our freedom.”

Sadly, though, it’s not just foreigners who voted to restrict our rights, said the London Times in an editorial. The law overturning any country’s right to “opt out” of European labor laws was proposed by the Spanish and enthusiastically seconded by the French. But a good chunk of the British delegation voted for it, too—ironically, the part that is supposed to support the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Nearly every one of the Labor Party members of the European Parliament sided with the other Eurosocialists. The mass defection of Labor is yet another “sign of Blair’s waning authority.” Fortunately, the European Parliament doesn’t have the last word on this subject. The law must still be approved by the E.U.’s Council of Ministers—and it is there that Blair can seek allies.

He can count on Poland, said Konrad Niklewicz in Warsaw’s Gazeta Wyborcza. We, too, want to opt out of this onerous requirement. Our growing economy is struggling to overcome the torpor of 40 years of communism. We “simply can’t afford” to limit our workweek. If our doctors were forbidden from working more than 48 hours a week, we’d have to add 15,000 more staff positions to man the hospitals. If the rule applied to firefighters, we’d need several thousand more. Those two sectors alone would eat up an extra $30 billion of the state budget. Nor is Poland the only E.U. country in this predicament. The Brits should “approach the Czechs and Hungarians” to get help in blocking this violation of local sovereignty.

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Let’s hope they fail, said the Glasgow Herald in an editorial. Britain needs this law. We have the longest working hours in the E.U.—one in every five workers puts in more than 48 hours a week. “Is it a coincidence” that we also have the highest divorce rate? These punishing hours hurt our families, and they may be hurting our health. “This is not only about exhausted junior doctors making fatal errors, but also the factory worker who runs down a child while driving home after a double shift.” British business owners say that the new law will bankrupt them, but that’s what they said about the minimum wage, and it wasn’t true. “If we can thrive without sweatshop wages, we can thrive without sweatshop hours, too.”