In a press release issued on 27 February, UEAPME, the organisation representing small and medium-sized enterprises, has expressed concern about the European Commission’s plan to revise the written declaration directive.
The organisation says the European Commission’s proposals would lead to red tape and complicate the directive and the new definition of worker would raise a number of problems. The press release states that the Commission’s approach goes too far. The only source of satisfaction for SMEs is that freelancers would not be covered, but that is not good enough for SMEs.
"But introducing new rights which will impose new rules, such as on probationary periods, employment in parallel or predictability of work, on top of what already exists in the Member States is too heavy. Social partners would have been in the best position to define such detailed rules and conditions," said UEAPME general secretary Véronique Willems, despite the fact that the social partners had not been able to reach agreement in 2017 (see EUROPE 11900).
The Commission unveiled a draft directive at the end of December revising the ‘written declaration’ directive (91/533/EEC) to make contractual relations between employers and employees more transparent and predictable and to extend the rules to new forms of contract connected with the emergence of digital platforms (see EUROPE 11931).
The UEAPME’s position can be found at: : http://bit.ly/2GXsgx0 (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)