Collective Bargaining For Self Employed Workers In Europe

Collective Bargaining for Self-Employed Workers in Europe Approaches to Reconcile Competition Law and Labour Rights Founding Editor: Roger Blanpain General Editor: Frank Hendrickx Edited by Bernd Waas & Christina Hießl The increase in the number of self-employed workers, partially in response to the advent of the platform economy, has raised the spectre of horizontal price-fixing by self-employed members of a profession. This perception, however, is at odds with international labour standards, under which self-employed persons should also be able to conclude collective agreements to some extent. It is now commonplace for companies to offer various forms of non-standard employment that shift risk from the labour engager to the labour provider – which may increase the likelihood of those workers to fall outside the legal concept of ‘employee’ and because of that affects their legal protection. Legal practitioners may then face a dilemma: what may be required under labour law may be prohibited under antitrust law. In the first comprehensive analysis of these intensely debated issues, the authors argue that there is an urgent need to address the current legal puzzle, including through regulatory measures. This must include, in particular, the existing regulation at the level of the European Union (EU), which dominates competition law in the Member States. The book combines an analysis of the supranational framework by experts in labour law as well as competition law with in-depth country reports from Member States of the EU in which regulations and/or practices of collective bargaining for the self-employed exist. Among the many issues discussed in this book are the following: collective bargaining and international labour rights; self-employed individuals and the concept of undertaking in EU competition law; the concept of ‘social dumping’; the importance of the case law of the European Court of Justice; the concept of ‘vulnerability’; competition authorities’ enforcement strategies and priorities; the concept of ‘false self-employed’; and the possible introduction of exemptions, presumptions, safe harbours, or smart regulation solutions in competition law. The book gives an insight into the legal situation in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden. These reports discuss the current practice of collective bargaining and how the current law is reflected in the academic discourse on the right of self-employed people to bargain collectively. This important book, in its presentation of legally sound and effective ways to shape the application of the right to bargain collectively that are attuned to the business and technological realities of the twenty-first century, promotes an understanding of the consequences for current law and practice and offers a basis for a discussion of regulatory measures addressing existing challenges. Practitioners of labour law and competition law, national competition authorities, and other interested parties will benefit from the detailed analysis and extensive findings.

This book aims at explaining the variance in legal status, working conditions, social protection and collective representation of self-employed professionals across Europe. Despite considerable diversity, the authors observe three strategic models of mobilisation: the provision of services; advocacy, lobbying and the political role; and the extension of collective bargaining. They highlight the new urgent challenges that have emerged including the implementation of universal social protection schemes, active labour market policies likely to support sustainable self-employment, and the renewal of social dialogue through bottom-up organisations to extend the collective representation of project-based professionals.

Platform work arrangements are often defended as an expression of technological progress with the potential to enable people to work as self-employed individuals, often without any supervision or control. However, by now, it is well-documented that platform work not only shares important features of flexibility and precariousness with other casual work arrangements that are on the rise around the world, but it also entails the risk of excluding a significant portion of workers from the protection of fundamental collective labour rights, including their coverage from collective agreements. In this important and timely book, the author shows how a human rights-based approach (HRBA) towards collective labour rights can bridge this protection gap. Such an approach identifies workers, regardless of their employment status, as rights-holders that are entitled to rights, like the right to collective bargaining, derived from international human rights and labour rights instruments. Fully describing the phenomenon of platform work as well as presenting a detailed global overview of responses related to the challenges stemming from platform work arrangements, the research, inter alia, covers aspects, such as the following: problems, challenges, and questions related to platform work arrangements, and how those are linked to broader labour market trends; platform work’s deeper foundational implications for labour law; legal developments related to the regulation of platform work with an assessment of their limits when it comes to collective labour rights, also recognised as human rights; various ways in which platform workers and other atypical workers have managed to exercise their collective labour rights; and promising indications of closer cooperation between organised labour and workers in non-standard forms of employment. The analysis draws on international human rights and labour rights treaties and conventions, domestic legislation and regulations, rulings from international and national courts, and interpretative and authoritative sources including the relevant legal literature. The book manifests and responds to a genuine need for in-depth research with respect to the protection of the human rights of platform workers with an analytical framework that will ensure their adequate protection. Its crucial observations will be welcomed by practitioners in labour law, human rights law, and competition law, as well as by academics, human resources professionals, and labour and employment policymakers.

'Beyond Employment is a useful contribution to the debate on how society should go about regulating work in the early 21st century.' -John Philpott, Financial Adviser'Suited to students interested in labour law and employment in Europe' -European Access PlusThis book is the English edition of what has become widely known as 'The Supiot Report', a bold and far-reaching look at the changing nature of work, employment and labour institutions, and systems of regulation and welfare. The author places recent developments in their economic, social, institutional, and legal contexts, and draws upon illustrations from a number of European countries.

The insertion in June 1997 of a Title on employment in the Treaty on European Union has accelerated the drafting of European policy in this field over the last few years. This European dynamic has had widespread impact on the themes and mechanisms that characterise national systems of industrial relations. On the one hand, employment is increasingly governed by rules negotiated between the social partners and, depending on the circumstances, the State. This phenomenon of joint labour market regulation is confirmed by a marked desire on the part of employers' associations and trade unions to integrate employment-related issues into their actions and negotiations. On the other hand, the incorporation of employment-related themes by employers’ associations and trade unions, usually in concertation with government policies, is related with greater coordination of bargaining and concertation mechanisms established at European level and within each Member State. Today, the various national realities appear to be directed to various degrees by these two general tendencies. These phenomena active in the field of employment bargaining must therefore be analysed on three counts: the first focuses on the development of the coordination mechanisms that structure these negotiations, and more specifically raises the issue of co-responsibility for the labour market; the second deals with the strict content of employment bargaining, and examines the question of negotiated flexibility of working conditions and employment; the third addresses the autonomy of collective bargaining in Europe. This analysis informs our research, which is in turn intimately linked to recent changes taking place in national systems of industrial relations.

This discerning book provides a wide-ranging comparative analysis of the legal and social policy challenges posed by the spread of different forms of precarious work in Europe, with various social models in force and a growing ‘gig economy’ workforce. It not only considers the theoretical foundations of the concept of precarious work, but also offers invaluable insight into the potential methods of addressing this phenomenon through labour regulation and case law at EU and national level.

In many EU Member States, the various economic crises of recent years provided grounds for a rarely equalled level of state intervention in the regulation of labour relations with an explicit aim: the decentralisation of collective bargaining. An extensive body of research – summed up and analysed expertly in the chapters of this very important book – reveals that the process of decentralisation has more often than not led to a situation where salaries and labour conditions are ever more frequently determined by direct negotiations between employer and employees, with the State becoming the sole guarantor of employee protection even as it encourages decreasing labour costs to ensure that companies remain competitive. The comparative approach offered in this book adds to this synthesis by providing examples of speci c recent developments in fourteen Member States and Turkey. Among the numerous topics and issues that arise are the following: – ‘opt-out’ clauses that derogate unfavourably from sectoral agreement standards; – extension of the employer’s unilateral decision-making power; – ‘memoranda of understanding’ imposed by the ‘troika’ (EU, ECB, and IMF); and – ‘stand-by arrangements’ imposed by the IMF. However, notwithstanding the strong emphasis on changing the structure of collective agreements by shifting the centre of gravity closer to the company, research nds promise in the reconstituted support for sector-level agreements increasingly found among very small businesses, networked businesses, and work via digital platforms. This is the rst book to take stock of the current state of collective bargaining in Europe. It is an essential study for labour and employment law practitioners, and an exemplary analysis of immeasurable value to policymakers and academics in the eld.

"This book pertains to the results of the project 'COGENS: Collective Bargaining and the Gig Economy - New Perspectives' ... financed by the European Union"--ECIP galley.