Wages should never leave workers and their families living in poverty. However, that has been the reality for one in ten workers in Europe. The EU minimum wage directive is a step in the right direction for fairer wages across Europe. Nonetheless, this directive is not an end in itself. More work needs to be done to maximise its potential benefit and ensure that wages are collectively bargained. Collective bargaining is a collective benefit: it means better outcomes for workers, the economy and society as a whole.
Workers
It was the early spring of 1957, when a group of smartly dressed gentlemen were sitting at a table in Rome. After a long day of meetings, the gentlemen signed a document that laid the foundation for the future European Union: the Treaty of Rome. Most ideas that originated there have been made reality over […]
The Covid pandemic has drawn new attention to the key importance of personal services for household survival, ranging from food delivery to care services. But all too often such services are provided by precarious workers, often employed via online platforms. Platform work is widespread across Europe and growing rapidly, research funded by the European Foundation for Progressive […]
The labour status of people working in the online platform economy is key to their socio-economic protection. But it has proven a difficult issue for courts and regulators. The EU is considering introducing a ‘rebuttable presumption of employment’ to help address this problem. What could this entail exactly? For some time now, one of the […]
All managerial functions are now entrusted to algorithm-powered tools, raising large expectations and new risks. This trend is not confined to platform work. No economic sector is immune to the adoption of such systems. The EU institutions are engaged in a promising process that may lead to new regulatory solutions, but social dialogue and collective […]
This leads to situations where foreign workers don’t even care to learn Czech or identify themselves with the Czech environment.