After several failed attempts, the European Union (EU) finally reached an agreement on the final wording of the proposed directive that will regulate the presumption of employment of workers on digital platforms such as Uber, Glovo or Bolt. To break the negotiation deadlock, the European Labor Council, which met this Monday, made some concessions to companies and decided to increase the criteria needed to validate the existence of an employee contract from two to three, which means drivers or couriers will bind.
The document, which was approved this Monday, is still subject to scrutiny by the European Parliament. If it gets the green light, the directive must be transposed by the member states within two years, but with the necessary adjustments. The Portuguese law, which came into force on May 1 under the Decent Work Agenda, and which is more generous in not imposing an exact number of requirements to prove the presumption of employment, must prevail. After participating in the Council, the Portuguese Secretary of State for Labour, Miguel Fontes, explained to Lusa that it was “black and white that countries can always keep their legal regime, when they understand that it is more beneficial for the protection of workers in the face of what can be approved” in the EU, recalling that Portugal “already has its own legal framework”.
Initially, the proposal discussed in the Assembly of the Republic defined that it would be necessary to meet two of a set of six indicators to testify to the presumption of cooperation between service providers and digital platforms or intermediaries. But in the legal text, published in Diário da República, this criterion disappeared. That is, there is no mandatory minimum number under the six conditions laid down in legislation, such as determining the remuneration for the platform or belonging of the equipment to the multinational.
So, “our law is much more protective, because it opens up a range of possibilities,” explains Eduardo Castro Marques, of Dower Law Firm, to Dinheiro Vivo. The employment law specialist indicates that in theory “compliance with an indicator will suffice”. However, he believes that “its application will be very difficult if there is no agreement on the part of the employer”, so he foresees that “many processes will end in court”.
The proposal will have to pass through the sieve of the European Parliament. The aim is to have a directive by 2024 that will be transposed by the member states with the necessary adjustments.
The proposal for a directive that the European Council is now going to forward to the Members of the European Parliament went in the opposite direction and tightened the conditions for binding employees. A journey that the European Commissioner for Employment, Nicholas Schmit, acknowledged was necessary to reach an agreement: “This process was not easy, we failed in December, but if we had not succeeded, the negotiations would have been much more complicated “. Speaking at the end of the European Council, the European Responsible for Labor Protection revealed that it was then necessary to “raise the criteria from two to three”. “This was the key point in the negotiations, we made some adjustments to reach a consensus together with member states,” added Paulina Brandberg, Minister for Gender Equality and Working Life of Sweden, the country that holds the rotating presidency of the Council for the first half of the year and ends at the end of this month.
Previously, the European proposal provided for meeting two of the five requirements and has now raised the bar to three of the seven indicators. Two more were added to the list of five conditions, under which the company also provides for wage formation: “The digital work platform limits, including through sanctions, the freedom to organize work, limits the possibility to accept or refuse tasks ; the digital work platform limits, including through sanctions, the freedom to organize the work and limits the possibility to call on subcontractors or substitutes”.
There are more than 28 million platform workers in the EU. Most are independent, but at least 5.5 million are fake green receipts.
Nicholas Schmit hopes to “reach an agreement between the European Parliament and the Council”, but he is not bound by deadlines. In an interview with Lusa in May, the commissioner stated that “the best case scenario” would be to have the legislation in place by the end of 2023, although he admitted at the time that “the calendar is the end of [mandato do] European Parliament”, in view of the European elections in May 2024. If the directive does not enter into force until next year, Member States will have to adapt it to national legislation in the next two years, until 2026.
It is estimated that there are more than 28 million digital platform workers in the EU. The vast majority are self-employed, but at least 5.5 million wrongly have that status, a situation that Brussels wants to reverse by fighting the fake green voucher so that these workers receive employment protection.
Dinheiro Vivo journalist
Source: DN
