Ludovic Voet is the Confederal Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). For EUROPE, he reviews the European Commission’s announcements on the energy crisis. He also expresses his concern about the discussions in the EU Council on the Digital Platform Workers Directive. (Interview by Solenn Paulic)
Agence Europe - Belgium was on strike on 21 September to protest against inflation and demand wage increases. Do you think the Commission’s response to the energy crisis is adequate?
Ludovic Voet - We have launched a broad campaign with six concrete actions to respond to the cost of living crisis, including wage increases, concrete support for households, a cap on energy prices, a tax on the super-profits of energy companies and a reform of the energy market. We see that things are moving forward little by little, even though all these ideas have been on the table for six months.
The State of the Union speech was a wake-up call, but we will have to act quickly, because it will be difficult to tell people that aid will only arrive in a few months.
The Commission could also announce a SURE 2.0 instrument, a shock absorbing mechanism for unemployment systems, because the energy crisis is indeed a shock: SMEs are being strangled, there is a great risk of production closures in certain industrial sectors.
We absolutely need a European mechanism to avoid, in particular, the blackmail of relocation that certain multinationals would be tempted to exercise at national level.
The directive on minimum wages is also timely. Because raising wages, not just minimum wages, is an answer to being able to pay your energy bills; wages should all at least rise with inflation. We should not wait two years to implement it and we will help the national unions to put pressure.
On digital platforms workers, do you agree with the direction taken by the Czech Presidency of the EU Council? After the ‘Uber files’, the ETUC called for a halt to the negotiations...
We were not asking to stop the whole process, but if this directive only goes in the direction of Uber, it would be better to draw from the consequences and try to obtain a more ambitious text. And the current discussions give us the feeling that Uber’s strategies to avoid too much regulation are working.
What is problematic is that the discussions in the EU Council seem to be about how to complicate the reclassification of workers (as employees) when the starting point of this text is still the recognition of the phenomenon of false self-employment.
The Commission’s text refers to the need to meet two out of five criteria to trigger the presumption (of employment, editor’s note) and it seems that they want to make it even harder. We believe that there should be no criteria to condition this presumption of salaried status, which is what the European Parliament is also asking for.
This does not mean that all workers will be employees, they will simply be in the platforms that cannot prove the opposite.
If this presumption has to be activated by a worker or a labour inspectorate, years will be lost; if there is a year of negotiation of the text, two years of transposition and then still the possibility for the platform to rebut this presumption, we will not have any reclassification of workers for four or five years and, by then, platforms will have had ample time to develop in many sectors such as home care, catering and temporary work.
We could go from 28 million workers today to 43 million in three years; if the development of these platforms is not regulated, if it is difficult to launch the presumption of salaried status and if, in the end, the presumption is not generalised to all workers who do the same work, then we will have an insufficient tool. The fact that the Czech Presidency can unravel the text is a real red flag.
The fact that it also introduces a derogation for authorities responsible for, for example, social security and tax or criminal proceedings is also problematic; you would lose one way to tackle the problem. In Finland, the court decision to consider Wolt workers as workers was initiated by an investigation by a health and safety institution. We need all authorities to investigate.
We must fight to ensure that this directive is not an empty shell. The work of the European Parliament and the member countries who want an ambitious tool will therefore be crucial.
What about platform workers who are undocumented: is it the missing part of the directive?
We need to separate the procedures that would be related to labour law and those related to migration and sending them back to their country of origin.
Otherwise, these workers will never ask for the rights offered by the directive and will continue to accept precarious working conditions. We cannot have a directive that would lead to a loss of rights or money for these workers.
European employers, who often complain about staff shortages, could call for regularisation mechanisms at European level, but they do not.
Institutional negotiations are about to start on the Social Climate Fund; some people think that this tool is already outdated...
The Fund is essential, but poorly funded and unlikely to do the job if inflation and energy prices remain unchanged. And its link to ETS 2 (the emissions trading system that will include buildings and road transport) is even more problematic, as it will further increase the burden on households.
Prime Minister Alexander de Croo has predicted 10 very difficult years for Belgian households, so it is hard to see how he could still say in 2025, a year before the supposed launch of the Fund, that the price of fuel oil or the price at the pump will have to be increased again to be able to finance it via the ETS 2.
The useful debate today could ultimately be to know to what extent the Fund is not the right solidarity tool now to respond to the scale of the energy crisis; one could ask whether it is not this Fund that should be financed by taxes on the super-profits of energy companies, in the short term, and in the long term, by taxes on the incomes of the richest to mitigate the costs of the green transition for the population.
It's an idea in the air, but we might as well make sure that the Social Climate Fund can already respond to current problems.