Sources told EUROPE on 25 April that Member States’ positions on the directive on digital platform workers did not change when the EU Council’s Working Party on Social Questions met on Monday, 24 April (see EUROPE 13163/5).
Therefore, the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the EU now reportedly intends to request that there be a political discussion in the Committee of Permanent Representatives in mid-May, even though the possibility of drafting a new compromise text and creating a new working party on the subject has not yet been totally excluded.
During Monday’s discussion, Member States’ divergent positions on the criteria for triggering the legal presumption of employment were reiterated. Certain delegations, concerned about the directive’s impact on this new platform economy and its development in their respective countries, thus continue to call for the addition of a new criterion to trigger this legal presumption (four out of seven criteria inspired by the Court of Justice’s ‘Yodel’ ruling, rather than three out of seven).
Other delegations want to bring back Article 4-2a—which provided that a platform is not linked to one of the three criteria necessary to trigger the presumption if the criterion has already been fulfilled by virtue of an agreement or a national text—and to strengthen the related recitals.
For the countries said to be ‘pro’ the European Commission text, the latest compromise still was not sufficiently ambitious or protective of workers; this group of countries wants more progress. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)