[ar-jan]

I read about it in Dutch news, which also mentioned that other countries also have volunteer firefighting forces, but I didn't look up their numbers. Various officials here said it would have big implications and keeping the system as it is would be impossible. So some law or regulation would have to change. Incidentally this is a good example of why EU regulations can be so problematic: if this example is fixed, it will be because many countries have large volunteer forces so the problem cannot be ignored. But if the regulation happens to affect just one or a few smaller countries you might be out of luck. Not everything can be regulated centrally without unintended consequences.

[daleharvey]

Speaking as a Brit

Read the replies to your original post, there was no new regulation, whatever you read in the news was made up. In the british press there is a constant stream of fabricated stories about EU "regulations" that take a cursory google to disprove.

[NeedMoreTea]

It's so bad in the UK that some years ago the EU set up a "British Euromyths" blog, to highlight all the Daily Mail type "EU about to ban breathing!" stories. The pieces are mainly from the expected suspects.

https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/

No idea if there is a Netherlands equivalent.

[laumars]

It's so bad that the majority of people from deprived areas of the UK, places neglected by their own national government but do receive millions in EU funding still believed they would be better off leaving the EU. It's total madness.

[ar-jan]

There's plenty of generalizations and simplifications of issues, and in a few newspapers the tone is generally more critical of the EU. But most mainstream newspapers are actually quite pro-EU in general.

[ar-jan]

Speaking as a Dutchman. The news that was reported here was accurate. My reply on another comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21124780:

1. I should have said "impossible" rather than illegal (although the consequence is still that it would be, well, illegal under EU law). That's the implication of what was reported in the Netherlands. For those who read Dutch, see e.g. https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/brandweer-dreigt-vrijwilligers-.... and https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/vrijwilligers-b....

2. I was mainly talking about about (the effect of) overregulation in general, I did not say there is a specific regulation re volunteer firefighters. But if the implied problems become reality, it would be because of interpretation of laws and regulations.

Yes, there was a lawsuit in Belgium. And no, that's not the main issue that was reported here. Lawyers conducted a study of the practice of Dutch firefighting on behalve of the Ministry of Justice and Security, and concluded that the way our system is set up contradicts EU law. The main issue is that volunteer firefighters do almost exactly the same work as paid firefighers.

3. That's point 1.

4. This is exactly my more general concern about the EU: unintended consequences are inevitable when you are centralizing laws and regulations to the most detailed levels for over two dozen countries with very different contexts. There are plenty of EU laws and regulations for which I think the intent is very sensible, but where implementation can be problematic, or problematic for specific subsets of the regulation, or specific countries/regions.

5. I never said they happened, I said "will". Perhaps I should have said "may" since the problem might still be addressed somehow. But even if it is adressed, in the case of the Netherlands a massive change would be necessary. According to lawyers and law professors who have studied the problem in the Dutch context.

So no, not misinformation. I just worded it somewhat imprecise.

[nolok]

But there is no issue really, just a case where the states didn't respect EU laws that they themselves wanted.

The EU law states no worker can work more than X hours a week, for the health benefit of the citizens. A court ruled that the volunteer firefighters time counts as working time. So now we need to include that in how we make them work when we need.

Knowing my country (France), I'm sure it will be some sort of "the hours worked as voluntary firefighter are not due to their other employer, but will still be paid probably by the state or by the employer but with according tax deduction", something like this.

So now comes a choice; either we think it's unhealthy for people to work more than 42 hours a week (and we did since we voted this in), and then it makes sense. Or we don't, and then we're free to change the regulation. Or we think some form or work shouldn't count against that limit (such as public work for emergency services) and we can update the regulation.

Saying we shouldn't make regulation because sometime we may have to redefine more precisely some of its details when the situation arise makes very little sense to me.

[ar-jan]

But that's not quite the problem we appear to have here in NL. There's a law whose basic intent is that you cannot use volunteer workers for what should actually be paid work. Here volunteers do almost exactly the same work as professional firefighters and therefore they should be paid employees under this law. Applying this to volunteer firefighters is an unintended consequence, but it's obligatory.

> Saying we shouldn't make regulation because sometime we may have to redefine more precisely some of its details when the situation arise makes very little sense to me.

My concern is both practical and philosophical: our firefighting system will very likely be reorganized; this is going to cost a lot of money and time, volunteers are likely to quit if things are no longer easily combined with their job, quality would almost certainly drop (since it's already high), and then, hopefully, in the end we still have a functioning firefighting service. But all that work will not actually solve any problem, it's just for complying with regulations.

On the philosphical end: the complexity and the number of laws and regulations keeps growing, and so does the scale at which they're applied. I think such unintended consequences will keep coming up at the local level, far from where they originated centrally, and in the long run it will be increasingly difficult to solve these problems.

[nolok]

But the political/legal situation is still the same really.

We have this law to avoid abusing "free" people as volunteer, which eg in France is important against lots of things like illegal immigrant ("I don't pay you but you can sleep there !"), and to ensure egality (in France we have an even stricter law which is basically "for the same work, same salary", to avoid discrimination against various ethnics, gender, age ... difference).

If you / the NL people are saying this cause an issue, and the law should be changed to, for exemple, not include free work done for emergency public services, then it simply means we need to add a precision to the law to cover that specific case.

And if it isn't done, then it means "all those affected countries" either didn't push for it or failed to convince the whole of the EU to change the regulation.

EU regulation are done by EU MPs all coming from their respective EU countries to improve the situation there, they don't implement things randomly in a vacuum. If the regulation needs to be adapted, it's easy, given those who want it can make a case for it.

[ar-jan]

My fundamental concern is the scale mismatch. If you notice the problem locally, it can be very hard and potentially impossible to address it locally, because EU-wide regulations increasingly take precedence.

[johannes1234321]

That is one of the reasons for the EU being so complicated. To counter the effect there is not only the Parliament which has to approve a new rule, but also the EU Council, the later in some areas even unanimously.

There are different blockers in the system so that a (slim) majority can't simply overrule a minority.

[the_mitsuhiko]

It’s not even a regulation. It was a court that decided on this matter.

[anoncake]

Courts don't decide policy, they interpret the law.

[ar-jan]

Yes it's due to laws and regulations. It's all part of EU labour law. See my other comment.