Documents minimum wage 1 271 results

"As the first ever piece of EU legislation aimed explicitly at ensuring adequate minimum wages and promoting strong collective bargaining, the European Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages in the EU is a milestone in strengthening the social dimension of the European Union. Its ultimate policy objective is to reduce wage inequality and in-work poverty in order to advance upward social convergence and social cohesion across the EU. Because of the EU's limited competences on the issue of wages and collective bargaining, however, while the Directive is strong on procedural regulations it is weaker on substantive requirements, which are formulated mainly in terms of recommendations. This is why the real impact of the Directive in the sense of achieving its political objectives relies strongly on an ambitious transposition into national law that transforms the ‘soft law' of the Directive into hard law at national level.

One dimension of the analysis therefore concerns how the Member States have formally transposed the Directive into national law. However, the comprehensive formal transposition of the Directive is only one factor that will determine its success in realising its political objectives. The other important factor is the Directive's broader political implications as manifested in its influence on the political agenda and the political and public discourse about minimum wages and collective bargaining in the Member States. This report deals with both dimensions of the impact of the European Minimum Wage Directive."

"This study analyses firms' adjustment behaviour when facing higher labour costs. The empirical research design considers several outcomes, and exploits, as a source of variation in labour costs, discontinuities in the growth of contractual wages set by Italian collective bargaining institutions. The results indicate that adjustment channels are highly heterogeneous across the firms' productivity distribution. Employment, revenue, productivity and the profit margin are negatively related to contractual wage growth among relatively less efficient companies. Instead, most efficient firms do not downsize, they substitute high-wage workers with low-wage workers while preserving their productivity, and they may even increase (or at least keep constant) their profitability. We conclude that more efficient companies, which adjust through cost-saving and labour-hoarding strategies, may benefit from cleansing effects, as their product market shares increase when costs of more constrained rivals are raised."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"On 11 November 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU/Court) delivered the anxiously awaited judgment in Denmark v Parliament and Council (C-19/23). Save for a small part of it, the Court confirmed that the adoption of the Directive on adequate minimum wages from 2022 falls within the competences conferred on the Union by the EU Treaties. This was the most momentous judgment for the European trade union movement, and for EU labour lawyers, since the Viking and Laval duo in 2008; and it is likely to go down in history as one of the most significant CJEU rulings in the making of ‘Social Europe'."

"On 11 November 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU/Court) delivered the anxiously awaited judgment in Denmark v Parliament and Council (C-19/23). Save for a small part of it, the Court confirmed that the adoption of the Directive on adequate minimum wages from 2022 falls within the competences conferred on the Union by the EU Treaties. This was the most momentous judgment for the European trade union movement, and for EU labour lawyers, since the Viking and Laval duo in 2008; and it is likely to go down in history as one of the most significant CJEU rulings in the making of ‘Social Europe'."

"In this study, we review the patterns of low pay in Europe. We first describe the evolution of aggregate low-wage employment and the incidence of low pay among several groups of workers, then we look at the compositional changes that occurred in recent decades. Given the prevalence of wage regulation and collective bargaining in most European countries, we also analyse the role of labour market institutions on low pay. We show that minimum wages and union presence do play a relevant role in reducing wage inequalities. Finally, we investigate low pay in the long run and the evolution of earnings over the life-cycle. We show that earnings mobility has an equalizing effect over the long-run but its impact is small over 6/7 years. Empirical evidence from a number of OECD countries confirms that earnings inequality between individuals is lower when earnings are pooled over a number of years but, for Britain at least, the extent to which mobility reduces inequality has fallen over time suggesting a fall in mobility and an increase in long run inequality."

"The 2022 Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages in the EU marks a milestone on the journey towards a more social Europe. With its two key objectives of ensuring adequate minimum wages and strengthening collective bargaining, the Directive aims to realize the broader policy goals of reducing in-work poverty and wage inequality. In order to achieve these objectives, the Directive sets out procedures and reference values concerning minimum wage setting and collective bargaining. Of particular importance are the reference values for the assessment of the adequacy of statutory minimum wages set out in Article 5.4 of the Directive – this is the so-called ‘double decency threshold' of 60% of the national gross median wage and 50% of the national gross average wage.

Furthermore, the Directive contains several important provisions which aim to support (sectoral) collective bargaining. First, Article 3.3 emphasises that collective bargaining is the prerogative of trade unions. This is important to prevent a competitive race to the bottom through agreements concluded by non-union organisations which may undermine adequate minimum wage protection. Second, Article 4 contains various provisions calling on the Member States to promote the bargaining parties' capacity to engage in collective bargaining at (cross-) sectoral level, as well as to protect the right to collective bargaining. This explicitly includes protection against discrimination against union representatives who (seek to) exercise this right. Finally, Article 9 underlines that, in accordance with EU Public Procurement Directives 2014/23/EU, 2014/24/EU and 2014/25/EU, Member States shall take appropriate measures to ensure that, in the awarding and performance of public procurement or concession contracts, economic operators and their subcontractors comply with the applicable obligations regarding wages, the right to organise and collective bargaining on wage-setting.

Article 4.2 of the Directive, furthermore, requires each Member State in which collective bargaining coverage is below 80% to establish an action plan to promote collective bargaining. The aim of this provision is to create a framework of enabling conditions in these countries with a view to progressively increase bargaining coverage. In its expert group report on transposition of the Minimum Wage Directive, the European Commission clarifies that this threshold ‘imposes an obligation of effort, not of result' and should therefore not be viewed as ‘a mandatory target to be reached'. Thus, even if this provision does not oblige Member States to achieve collective bargaining coverage of 80% in the strict legal sense, it de facto defines an EU-wide standard for collective bargaining coverage that Member States should aim for as a necessary condition of adequate minimum wage protection."

"The topic of statutory minimum wage has gained new relevance in the recent years, also at European level. Most European countries already have schemes for statutory minimum wage, while this has been an alien concept in the Nordic context. The report provides an overview of the designs and effects of such schemes, and of how minimum wages are determined in the Nordic countries and in the few other EU countries that still have no statutory minimum wage. The report also looks into factors that can explain the diverse views on statutory minimum wage regulation and why Nordic trade unions have offered resistance towards European initiatives in this area."