Documents European Trade Union Institute, Brussels 1 327 results

"This reports has two goals. Firstly, it seeks to establish an overview of proceedings, whether they be actions for failure to fulfil obligations, actions for annulment, or references for a preliminary ruling – before the Court of Justice of the European Union associated with occupational health and safety directives between 1989 and 2022. A total of 173 decisions were selected and analysed. The variables taken into consideration were: the Member States against which the proceeding were brought, the year of the decision, the OSH directive examined and the type of proceedings. Secondly, by spotlighting certain patterns, it will be possible in future to build a litigation strategy for health and safety both by continuing to make references for a preliminary ruling to the Court and by turning decisions already made by the Court to account at national level."

"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 collection of four volumes charts the development of collective bargaining since the year 2000 in the 28 EU Member States.
These four volumes document how the institutions of collective bargaining have been removed, fundamentally altered or markedly narrowed in scope in all 28 EU Member States. However, there are also positive examples to be found. Some collective bargaining systems have proven more resilient than others in maintaining multi-employer bargaining arrangements. Based on the evidence presented in the country-focused chapters, the key policy issue addressed in this book is how the reduction of the importance of collective bargaining as a tool to jointly regulate the employment relationship can be reversed. The struggle to fend off the neoliberal assault on collective bargaining in Europe is moving towards an endgame. The outcome is still open."

"This report provides new projections, to 2026, of remote work rates and the accompanying macroeconomic implications for the EU27, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Republic of North Macedonia, Turkey and the UK.
Remote work covers a range of practices but few are straightforward to quantify consistently. The definition of remote work used in this report is working from home (WFH), matching the Eurostat Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) definition. The EU-LFS is the principal data source for this exercise. The literature review identified a range of drivers (e.g. sectoral composition of the economy) and potential outcomes (e.g. changes in expenditures on information and communications technologies (ICT)). Using a conceptual framework developed from the literature review, we modelled a baseline projection and three alternative scenarios: one that projected lower rates of WFH by 2026 compared to the baseline (Unwinding of WFH); and two that projected higher rates of WFH
(Acceleration of WFH and Acceleration of WFH with contract changes).By 2026, the baseline projects that 18% of workers in the EU27, and 19.6% of workers in all 33 study countries, will be working from home. There is substantial variation in these rates by individual country, from a 2026 rate of 42% in Luxembourg to 1% in Bulgaria and Romania. Compared to the baseline, the Unwinding of WFH scenario projects nearly 350 000 fewer total workers and more than 10 million fewer WFH workers by 2026, with the reduction concentrated mostly in services. The Acceleration of WFH scenario projects more than 830 000 additional workers in total and more
than 24 million more WFH workers by 2026, employed mostly in service sectors. The Acceleration of WFH with contract changes scenario projects nearly one million more total workers and more than 24 million more WFH workers by 2026. In this scenario, workers are assumed to shift from permanent to self-employed contract positions, leading to a projected increase in the rate of self-employment of 3.7 percentage points compared to the baseline. An unwinding of WFH in Europe would generate modest increases in costs for firms, mild decreases in total employment for workers and small aggregate output reductions. An acceleration of WFH, coupled with an increase in digital development in Europe, would provide benefits in terms of cost savings to firms,
higher employment and higher output. However, there is a risk that higher levels of WFH could lead to contract changes that, while providing benefits to firms, could undermine workers' power, pay and benefits. This has not been explicitly modelled in these projections but warrants deeper consideration."

"With the Platform Work Directive still under negotiation and the ETUC calling for an EU Directive on Algorithmic Systems at Work, groundbreaking research into the Spanish-Italian Glovo-Foodinho firm, a digital labour platform, has opened up an alternative path for workers wanting to scrutinize application and access their rights in digitalised workplaces, governed by algorithmic management. This involves closed cooperation between trade unions, reverse engineering and Data protection authorities (DPA).

As illustrated in this report, the current GDPR legislative framework has proven to be both robust and flexible. The report also reveals the details of the collaboration between ETUI and a technical team of experts led by Claudio Agosti into the so-called 'black box'. It details how the algorithmic management systems used by Foodinho, an Italian subsidiary of the Spanish food delivery company Glovo, works to control its workforce, namely:

1.Tracking riders' location outside working hours.
2.Sharing the location (both outside and during working hours), along with other personal data, with undisclosed third parties not mentioned in the app's documentation.
3.Generating a score associated with the rider's personal profile, a value inconsistent with the documented ‘Excellence Score' provided by Glovo-Foodinho: a hidden score.

Background:

In 2019, algorithm analyst, Claudio Agosti, started to work with the ETUI Foresight Unit on research and training courses aimed at understanding the ‘technicalities' behind Artificial Intelligence. Five years later, the ETUI is releasing a technical report which meticulously outlines the techniques used by researchers to observe the internal logic of the app used by riders in Italy and documents its actual behavior in terms of harvesting their personal data.

The technical analysis was made in 2021-2022-2023, after Italian DPA, responsible for enforcing the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) fined the company 2,600,000 euros in 2021 for failing to protect the digital rights of its workers. Glovo appealed. They did not pay the fine and as released in this report, they have continued the same unregular practices. Finally, these new evidences have been reported to the Italian DPA.

New challenges for workers' rights:

According to the authors of this ETUI report, collecting evidence about algorithmic management is critical for workers seeking to enforce their rights by filing complaints with national DPAs or the competent courts. The availability of technical expertise can also help improve workers' negotiating positions in a collective bargaining context. “Ultimately, we believe that, by helping workers understand the apps that control them, we can give them the key to unlocking their rights, thus building a fairer future of work for all.”

"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."

"Policy recommendations
The European Commission is soon expected to propose a European
company law framework designed specifically for ‘innovative' companies.
The evidence shows that the Achilles heel of a ‘28th company law regime'
is its inevitable impact in areas beyond company law, for example on
labour law, taxation, insolvency and social security.
A new company law framework for ‘innovative' companies must ensure:
• precise, enforceable eligibility criteria to prevent abuses;
• anti-abuse rules that block 'letterbox' setups and the exploitation of
known loopholes;
• dynamic worker participation safeguards that cannot be frozen or
evaded;
• guardrails for any Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) to protect
wages and revenues;
• a registration process that preserves real scrutiny over speed: a onestop digital portal can be built while maintaining necessary checks
and in a realistic verification timeframe using existing instruments.
Fostering innovation in the EU is possible without eroding workers' rights
or regulatory integrity if the relevant measures reflect lessons derived
from existing instruments, develop new instruments and ensure robust
cross-border enforcement."