The Council of the EU gave its final green light on Tuesday 4 October to the EU directive on adequate minimum wages (see EUROPE 12973/7). The European social affairs ministers gave political support to the text last June in Luxembourg. Member States will have two years to transpose the text.
Member States with statutory minimum wages are invited to put in place a procedural framework for setting and updating these minimum wages according to a set of clear criteria within two years.
The rate of coverage by collective bargaining on minimum wage setting will also have to be increased, the Council of the EU recalls in a statement. Where collective bargaining coverage is, for example, below a threshold of 80%, Member States will have to establish an action plan to promote collective bargaining.
Minimum wage setting will also have to take into account a number of criteria, including inflation, on the basis of a basket of identified goods and services.
Several Member States had wished, prior to this latest confirmation, to reiterate their position on this directive, which, for some of them, should not call into question the exclusive competence of the Member States to set these minimum wages. This is the case of Denmark, which has always voted against this directive and which recalled that “the social partners are responsible for wage setting in Denmark and it is essential to preserve the autonomy of the social partners in this regard”.
This is also the case for Hungary, which defends this exclusive competence and explained that the minimum wage level in Hungary has already increased by 20% from January 2022, “the highest increase in the EU”, according to the statement.
Bulgaria wished to specify gender-related elements, as did Hungary and Poland, who wished to have the references in the directive on the collection of statistical data on minimum wages broken down by ‘gender’ interpreted as data collections broken down by ‘sex’. Link to the statements: https://aeur.eu/f/3ds (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)