Archive Article: 2001/10/12

12 October 2001

Brussels bureaucracy brings bad vibrations

Brussels plans to limit exposure to what it calls whole body vibration in the workplace are a clear example of bureaucracy gone mad.

If agreed by MEPs and council in the next few months, it would limit farmers and their workers to just a few hours a day in the tractor cab. Without proven health benefit.

The debate this week was on whether the new limit should be set at 1.5m/sec sq, as favoured by member states, or 0.8m/sec sq as favoured by the parliaments employment and social affairs committee.

Either way, the plan is unworkable and unnecessary.

It is the Brussels policy makers who need a shake-up, to wake them up to the practicalities of working in the real world.