The latest madness from Europe - paid leave if you get sick on holiday

If you get sick on holiday through sun stroke or excessive drinking the European Court has decided you can now claim an extra days holiday when you return from Spain or Greece, at the expense of your employer. For full details read here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/9348026/EU-workers-sick-on-holiday-must-get-extra-time-off.html

This is at a time when the EU Recession is causing jobs everywhere to go.

Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain are all in the depths of the mother of all economic depressions, with unemployment at huge levels - 3 times our own.

There is an urgent need for jobs, growth, and hope.

It is well known that I support the work of trade unions, but I find the latest claim by the Spanish Trade Unions, now backed by the EU Court, to be bizarre.

Under the Working Time Directive, this judgment will be binding on all European countries, and all UK employers.

It will add an estimated £100 million a year cost to British employers. Spread throughout the economy, that is an irritation, not a catastrophe. But it is an unnecessary irritation. It sends all the wrong messages.

It reinforces the impression which many employers have formed over the past few decades: that hiring workers is risky, and should be avoided wherever possible.

I do not believe that the judges who ruled in favour of the Spanish trade unionists know anything about business, and seem to care nothing about the problems faced by employers, and are promoting a system that is destroying jobs.

Spain has youth unemployment at 50 per cent.

Europe’s problems far exceed the latest nonsense from the ECJ. Our self-interest is bound up with our neighbours’ fate. We do urgently need a renegotiation so that the EU’s power to interfere with us is circumscribed. Just when it seemed that Europe had crawled away from the chaos and conflicts which had threatened to destroy it, instability is back on the agenda.Yet all this is happening in the name of idealism.

The European project is such that a noble idea starts a process that takes us ever more illogically away from job creation, growth and a fair economy for all. Giving employees an extra days paid holiday for when they were ill abroad is both almost impossible to regulate [do you get a local GP sick note to prove your sunstroke or delhi belly?] and trouble for businesses. It sends the wrong message.
I find it hard to believe that when they started with the Euro project, did the founders consider this was the Euro dream?