The Swedish Presidency of the EU Council will test the Member States’ chances of reaching an agreement on the digital platform workers directive on Wednesday 24 May.
It will sound out national delegations on a new text and try to get a green light for a political agreement (‘general approach’) at the Employment and Social Affairs Council on 12 June.
This latest text, dated 17 May, does not, however, contain any major changes to the previous compromise of 14 April (see EUROPE 13169/24). At the last working group, the Member States stuck to their positions and were unable to give the text a majority. Furthermore, Berlin’s position is still pending.
In its note of 17 May, the Presidency explains how it has conducted the work, particularly on the criteria for triggering the presumption of employee status, which it has left unchanged since the Czech Presidency because of its “conviction this represents the right balance between the diverging requests of delegations”. However, it has deleted Article 4-2-a and amended the chapeau to Article 4(1) to clarify that the criteria for the presumption are triggered either by the applicable terms and conditions of the digital labour platform or by its action in practice.
In a new recital, the Commission clarified that a platform cannot be held liable if one of the criteria is met solely on the basis of compliance with the requirements of EU law, national law or collective agreements.
In its last text, it consolidated, in this recital, the references to self-employed workers and to collective agreements organising their working conditions.
For the sake of clarity, recital 24 has been divided into three separate recitals and amended, the Presidency explains. The recital recalls, with regard to the definition of the subordination relationship between a platform and a worker, that the “terms and conditions applicable to persons performing platform work are typically determined and imposed unilaterally in practice, leaving no possibility for the person performing platform work to influence the substance of such terms and conditions”.
The reference to the Commission’s guidelines on the application of EU competition law to collective agreements concerning the working conditions of self-employed workers is strengthened “to recognise that these collective agreements present an opportunity to improve working conditions for solo self-employed”, explains the Presidency. These additions are meant to reassure countries where self-employed platform workers are subject to collective agreements, as happened recently in France where an agreement was reached on minimum pay.
In this text, the Presidency further strengthens the language on the substantive reclassification of platform workers who, once recognised as employees, should automatically benefit from equivalent rights.
Link to the draft general approach: https://aeur.eu/f/709 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)