Documents Steiert, Marc Benedict 2 results

"Advocate General Emiliou has delivered an inadequate Opinion on the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive 2022/2041/EU. Following a Danish request to annul this Directive, the Advocate General's Opinion proposes its full annulment based on a historically mistaken and overly extended understanding of the competence exclusion on pay in Art 153(5) TFEU set against a baffling presentation of Social Europe. In this working paper, we first challenge the AG's understanding of the pay competence exclusion which led him to recommend full annulment to the Court of Justice. This includes pointing out that, on one hand, the drafting history of Art 153 TFEU underlines an uncertain, therefore narrow exclusion of pay from EU competence. On the other hand, we place the Opinion in the context of the EU's earlier labour law and the Court's case-law to show the many EU legal instruments that regulate pay already in a way which the Advocate General would consider prohibited under Art 153(5) TFEU, and to emphasise the Court's insistence on a narrow pay competence exclusion. We then consider the Advocate General's inadequate depiction of EU social law around the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive which provided the wrong context for his reasoning on the annulment action. The Court of Justice is entirely free not to follow the Opinion in its reasoning, in its knowledge and in its outcome. The pay competence exclusion in Art 153(5) TFEU should be interpreted narrowly and, therefore, the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive's legal basis maintained."

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

"Youth unemployment is on the rise again. The COVID-19 pandemic is not only an unprecedented health crisis but is also tangible through an immense economic downturn with an increase of the EU-wide youth unemployment rate from 15,7 to 17,6% as one of its features. The pandemic destroys job opportunities for newcomers in the labour market and has, therefore, inversed the downward trend of youth unemployment of the last years. Moreover, a well-known feature of previous economic crises also characterizes the pandemic: young workers on the EU-level have lost their jobs more frequently in a permanent manner than other age groups. Therefore, youth unemployment is back on the European agenda but are we heading once again towards a lost generation?"