2004. évi 2. szám - Jura - Pécsi Tudományegyetem

István Horváth: Light and shadow
FORUM
István Horváth
head of the Legal Department of the Ministry of labour
Light and shadow
The successes and problems of
Europe in the Hungarian labour law
1. Apart from some absolute results, most of the different
aspects of life can be said to be dual. Success
has its price as well, and often it is failure that teaches
us the most. The official subject for this article refers
to the labour law challenges associated with the
enlargement of the EU. Thinking about the message
I have recognized the abovementioned duality and
given the title „light and shadow” to my article. On
one side of the coin is the light which symbolizes the
successes of the European labour law legislation. On
the other side is the shadow; the problems common
throughout Europe on the level of the Member States
and the Union.
The directives of the EU determine the common
but not uniform labour provisions, which have
regard to the specialist needs and requirements of
Member States. The twenty-five Member States are
twenty-five different entities – besides their individual
identities they have a separate legal system
and separate historical traditions and social interests.
The different levels of social dialogue and the
variable incidences of collective agreements in each
of the Member States results in a different intensity of
the state’s role concerning labour law. The directives
constitute the labour law expectations of the more
developed – and probably luckier – part of Europe.
The content of these directives eventually expresses
the will of the Member States, as the decision-making
mechanism of the EU does not act independently in
this respect. All of these were not true till 1st May, to
the nine other countries accessing to the EU together
with Hungary. The participants from these new
accession countries may confirm that the need to
comply with the requirements of the EU has brought
about absolute and inevitable external expectations
of the accession in all of the ten countries.
From the 1st of May the obligation to implemention
of the directives is converted, and the accession
countries will also be entitled to take part
in the constitution of the directives as well. The first
task is to teach – during the general revision of the
working time directive – how, by which procedure
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and through which partners to enforce our national
interests. The preparation of the legislation has
strengthened a new element, the lobbying among
the experts of the EU Member States. Several times
I have thought that the accelerated communication,
the dumps of e-mails, provide several points
of information but meanwhile the most important
thing may disappear: the time which is necessary to
produce adequate legislation.
How heavy was the workload of legal harmonization?
The answer is different for each Member
State, due to the twenty-five different national
characters. The last five years for the ten accessing
countries have been a legal harmonizational derby,
as act modifications meant the implementation of
five or six directives apiece. The mentioned duality
characterizes the legal harmonization concerning the
enlargement of the EU. It is one experience to walk
and another to run on a nice promenade. When we
walk we have time to remember the beauty – when
we run all we remember is the rush. A significant
difference among the accessing countries and the
existing Member States is that the latter countries
implemented the directives in accordance with the
tempo of the European legislation, but for the ten
new Member States the process has been a kind of
modernization. Their internal rules have only been
tuned to the European wavelength for a short while.
To double back to the abovementioned question
let me relate a short story. In 2001, when Hungary
had already adopted two-thirds of the labour law
directives, Budapest Business Journal, an Englishlanguage
newspaper, invited me to a conference. I
was asked to rewiev the status of the legal harmonisation.
The majority of the audience came from foreign
countries but all of them worked in Hungary. I tried
to be expressive. Probably you remember „God must
be crazy”, the commercial in which a bottle of Coca-
Cola fell out of the sky and thumped onto the head
of a koissa. Well, concerning the legal harmonisation
it is not about the distance between the koissa and
the bottle of Coca Cola. Due to various historical
reasons, a unified Labour Code regulated employment
in the states of the Central-Eastern European
region, as in several countries of South America. In
our region obligatory historical reasons meant that
the Soviet model was followed, although several
rules were born which were a good standpoint to
the legal harmonisation, even though they were part
of a totally different political and economic regime.
Hungary is a small state. In our internal relationship
– in my opinion – the results and problems of
the civilised societies may be found and modelled.
The Hungarian legislation and the Hungarian em-
JURA 2004/2.