Europe
The ETUC has published a report examining legal issues arising from new forms of employment. It hopes that it will make an important contribution to the debate around what action to take to provide protection for workers who fall outside the normal framework of labour and social legislation. The legal experts who compiled the report included a proposal for a new “personal work relation” that might help tackle these issues.
(May 2017) A new report from the ETUI research institute explodes the myth that deregulation of employment protection legislation creates either economic growth or an increase in jobs. The report examines evidence from 10 countries (Spain, Italy, Estonia, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, France, Denmark, and the UK) and shows that the main impact in these measures has been the spread of precarious employment conditions.
The European Parliament (EP) has backed proposals to prevent platform companies from forcing workers into false self-employment and denying them rights to minimum wages, holiday and sick pay, and a secure employment contract. In recent years platform companies have lost a string of court cases over false self-employment, with the latest in the Netherlands where judges ruled “the legal relationship between Uber and these drivers meets all the characteristics of an employment contract.” The EP report supports a rebuttable presumption of an employment relationship for platform companies and