Elisabetta Gualmini (S&D, Italian), Parliament’s rapporteur on the directive on working conditions for digital platform workers, received the support of the Parliament on Thursday 2 February, which said that negotiations with the Council of the EU can begin on the basis of her report, once the Council has adopted its negotiating mandate.
The MEPs confirmed by 376 votes to 212 with 15 abstentions the position voted in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs on 12 December (see EUROPE 13083/31) and thus agreed to move straight to the negotiation phase.
Ms Gualmini hailed it as a “historic” vote, where the rights of exploited and vulnerable workers won. She also deplored the fact that the platforms put pressure on the MEPs until the last day to reject her report.
The vote was also welcomed by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and The Left and Greens/EFA groups, as well as some EPP MEPs, such as Denis Radtke (German), who welcomed a victory for workers in these sectors despite aggressive lobbying by platforms.
Platform representatives said the Parliament report ignores “the voices of millions of people who actively choose self-employment”, according to Delivery Platforms Europe (DPE).
More than 90 MEPs from different groups had called in January for a confirmation vote on the mandate. On Thursday, 90 EPP, 39 Renew Europe and 51 ECR MEPs voted against Ms Gualmini’s position, with a number of MEPs from these groups not taking part in the vote.
The MEP removed from her report the criteria proposed by the Commission at the end of 2021 to trigger a presumption of employee status for these workers, which has led the sector to fear that the automatic classification of platform workers as employees will become widespread.
A worker who believes that they are falsely self-employed will be able to assert this presumption and in the event of a dispute it will be up to the platform to prove that the worker in question is a genuinely self-employed person, based on a list of non-mandatory criteria that help to determine a person’s professional status.
MEPs also want to prohibit automated systems from making important decisions for workers.
The European Parliament believes that these new rules will better identify and reclassify ‘false self-employment’.
However, the platforms believe that Ms Gualmini’s report is not clear.
“If this were the final text, it would undermine legal self-employment and only increase legal uncertainty”, commented DPE, hoping that “the text can be further improved as the legislative process continues”.
Resumption of work in the Council of the EU
The Member States’ experts will resume work on 13 February. Discussions had stalled in December partly because of this concept of presumption of employee status (see EUROPE 13080/16).
The Swedish Presidency of the EU Council has prepared a note focused on Articles 3 and 4 of the directive, regarding the correct identification of professional status and legal presumption. It wants to identify, on the basis of the work carried out so far, what can potentially still be agreed or reviewed.
The discussion paper, as seen by EUROPE, covers four main issues and partly asks Member States to explain their national situation with concrete examples.
The Swedish Presidency wants to know whether the currently proposed criteria for triggering the presumption remain valid and whether the Member States consider that the falsely self-employed could benefit from the presumption of employment as it is defined.
It also asks whether the provision in Article 4.2.a, which is one of the most controversial, stating that a digital platform may not be considered to meet a criterion for triggering the presumption of employment under the directive if it already has to apply that criterion under national law or collective agreements, is necessary and cannot be achieved otherwise.
The questionnaire also covers the material effects of the reclassification of workers and the exclusion of certain authorities (social, fiscal, penal) from the scope of the directive.
An ‘Employment and Social Affairs’ Council scheduled for March may return to the matter again, although some observers believe it will be too early for an agreement.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/56m (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)