On Friday 8 March, the Member States’ ambassadors were still unable to reach agreement on the directive on digital platform workers, leaving the Employment and Social Affairs ministers to tackle the issue on 11 March, when they meet in the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council.
The Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU had focused its energy and hopes on Estonia over the last few days, with a single Estonian vote in favour enough for qualified majority on the agreement of 8 February reached with Parliament (see EUROPE 13347/8) and rejected at this stage by Paris, Berlin and Athens.
But Estonia has not yet been able to support the text, although some sources were optimistic about Monday’s meeting. The Estonian parliament did discuss the issue on 8 March, but the government will not make its decision until the morning of 11 March.
Unsurprisingly, France did not support the initial text of the agreement with Parliament either but tried to influence the decision with new recital proposals aimed in particular at taking even greater account of the status of genuinely self-employed people.
According to one source, Greece and Estonia even supported these amendments, which, however, would not be “acceptable” to Parliament.
The Italian rapporteur, Elisabetta Gualmini (S&D, Italian), is said to have complained to the Belgian Presidency about ‘fake news’ from Paris involving maintaining that Parliament was in agreement with these amendments, in order to possibly disrupt the Member States in support of the agreement reached with Parliament.
The MEP reportedly described this as “unacceptable behaviour” in violation of “sincere cooperation”, in an email to Belgium.
The French proposals as seen by Agence Europe show France proposing a recital 30a stressing that “this Directive fully respects the diversity in Member States’ labour law and domestic social model of regulation of the platforms. In this regard, it also respects the reality of the contractual relationship between a person performing platform work and the concerned digital labour platform. While it seeks to facilitate the reclassification of bogus self-employed as workers through the legal presumption, it should not cover all situations of persons performing platform work, in particular where self-employment accurately reflects the reality of the contractual relationship. In this context, the legal presumption should therefore not cover situations where the persons performing platform work are genuine self-employed”.
The French government also wanted to ensure that the legal presumption constitutes an “effective procedural facilitation if national law makes it effectively easy for the person performing platform work. [...] The purpose of the presumption is to effectively address and correct the unbalance of power between the persons performing platform work and the digital labour platform. The modalities of the legal presumption should be set out by the Member States”.
For Paris, it is essential that the procedure is effective, not that the reclassification is effective. The decision handed down at the end of the procedure must also genuinely respect the status of the self-employed and be as fair as possible.
However, the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU considers that these amendments go too far and, on 8 March, still had no intention of reopening the text of the agreement, precisely “because the requests submitted by Paris are already known and could not be validated at this stage by Parliament”, said a source.
In the event of failure on 11 March, time would be running out. However, the Presidency would still have a week or two to hope to obtain an agreement and have it validated in time. In any case, the Presidency is still holding out hope.
Link to the French amendments: https://aeur.eu/f/b7q (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)