European labour law

European labour law regulates basic transnational standards of employment and partnership at work in the European Union and countries adhering to the European Convention on Human Rights. In setting regulatory floors to competition for job-creating investment within the Union, and in promoting a degree of employee consultation in the workplace, European labour law is viewed as a pillar of the "European social model". Despite wide variation in employment protection and related welfare provision between member states,[1] a contrast is typically drawn with conditions in the United States.[2][3][4]

The European Union, under the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, article 153(1) is able to use the ordinary legislation procedure on a list of labour law fields. This notably excludes wage regulation and collective bargaining.[5] Four main fields of EU regulation of labour rights include (1) individual labour rights, (2) anti-discrimination regulations, (3) rights to information, consultation, and participation at work, and (4) rights to job security. In virtually all cases, the EU follows the principle that member states can always create rights more beneficial to workers.

The fundamental principle of labour law is that employees' unequal bargaining power justifies substitution of rules in property and contract with positive social rights so that people may earn a living to fully participate in a democratic society.[6] The EU's competences generally follow principles codified in the Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers 1989,[7] introduced in the "social chapter" of the Treaty of Maastricht.[8]

  1. ^ Alber, Jens; Gilbert, Neil (2010). United in Diversity?: Comparing Social Models in Europe and America. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Onlin. ISBN 9780195376630. Retrieved 11 September 2020.
  2. ^ McDowell, Manfred (1995). "NAFTA and the EC Social Dimension". Labor Studies Journal. 20 (1). Retrieved 11 September 2020.
  3. ^ Sapir, A. (2005): Globalisation and the Reform of European Social Models, Bruegel, Bruselas. Accessible por internet en [1]
  4. ^ Boeri, T. (2002): Let Social Policy Models Compete and Europe Will Win, conference in the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 11–12 April 2002.
  5. ^ TFEU art 153(1)
  6. ^ See further O Kahn-Freund, 'Hugo Sinzheimer' in Labour Law and Politics in the Weimar Republic (1981) 103, 'The technique of bourgeois society and its law is to cover social facts and factors of social existence with abstractions: property, contract, legal person. All these abstractions contain within them socially opposed and contradictory phenomena: property used for production and property used for consumption, agreements between equal parties and agreements between unequal parties, capitalist and worker. Through abstraction it is possible to extend legal rules, which are appropriate to the social phenomenon for which they were originally developed, to other social phenomena, thereby concealing the exercise of social power behind a veil of law'. A Supiot, Beyond Employment: Changes in Work and the Future of Labour Law in Europe (2001). S Deakin and F Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market (2005) 90.
  7. ^ See the Charter's text Archived 16 November 2013 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ^ Initially the UK had opted-out, because of opposition by the Conservative Party, but was acceded to when the Labour Party won the 1997 general election in the Treaty of Amsterdam.