Thread by @valeriodeste

So here are the Questions and Answers from the EU Commission about their Guidelines on collective bargaining of self-employed people ec.europa.eu/commission/pre… A short THREAD

https://twitter.com/valeriodeste/status/1468889518187024385

The Guidelines cover “only solo self-employed persons, namely, service providers who do not have any employees and who rely primarily on their own personal labour for the provision of the services.” 👇🏼

This notion corresponds to the personal work approach to competition law and collective bargaining advanced by @N_Countouris, myself and other colleagues (based on a longstanding idea of Mark Freedland and Nicola) HOWEVER… socialeurope.eu/collective-bar…

The Guidelines fall short of covering all the self-employed workers addressed under our proposals. The Commission specifies that they cover only: 1) the “economically dependent solo self-employed persons”, ie those who earn 50% or more of their income from a single principal👇🏼

2) “solo self-employed working “side-by-side” with workers” namely those solo self-employed who provide the same or similar tasks “side-by-side” with workers working for the same counterparty.

3) self-employed workers who work for digital labour platforms as defined by the Platform Work Directive presented today, and therefore as defined in the provision in this pic as “persons performing platform work”

These Guidelines, make no mistake, are a step forward compared to the existing situation where most vulnerable self-employed, including those working with platforms, were on too shaky grounds vis-à-vis competition law when trying to bargain collectively

It is also positive that the Guidelines do not only apply to platform workers as self-employed workers in need of the protection of collective bargaining are present in all the sectors and industries not only in platform work.

Nonetheless, the categories under 1) and 2) may be of difficult identification (income thresholds are proved difficult to apply and “working side-by-side” with workers can be too easily circumvented). In short, many self-employed persons in need of collective bargaining…👇🏼

… may still be arbitrarily excluded from protection. E.g. domestic workers who often are misclassified as self-employed, don’t work side by side with other workers, and often don’t receive 50% of their income from a single household are excluded if they don’t work for a platform

And this is only an example - many artists, voice-over actors, freelance journalists may be excluded from these criteria. The Guidelines, therefore, are still not entirely sufficient to provide collective bargaining protection to all workers who need it…

And have a right to collective bargaining under ILO’s and Council of Europe’s Standards (see more in this article written with @N_Countouris and @IoannisLianos) papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

@threadreaderapp unroll