The EU Council’s Belgian presidency is aligning more closely with France’s preferences in the updated Platform Workers Directive, as revealed by Euractiv.
The revised proposal reinstates key provisions important to Paris, aiming to regulate the working conditions of gig economy platform workers such as Just Eat and Bolt. Currently in the final stage of the legislative process, the directive is undergoing ‘trilogues’ involving the EU Council, Commission, and Parliament.
“In December, the Spanish Council presidency reached a provisional agreement with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on the matter. However, the political accord failed to secure a qualified majority within the Council of Ministers, as some member states felt the text deviated too much from their initially agreed positions.
In a document dated January 20, the Belgian presidency requested a revised mandate for negotiations with MEPs. This mandate is expected to be presented to EU ambassadors on Wednesday, January 24, with the aim of finalizing the directive before the EU elections in June.
The new draft reflects Belgium’s attempt to find a middle ground between the Parliament’s more detailed and worker-centric approach and the Council’s more flexible and business-oriented stance.
The cover note accompanying the draft emphasizes that the presidency adhered to the Council’s general approach as the baseline but also made efforts to retain key elements of the provisional agreement to facilitate consensus with the European Parliament. It acknowledges that certain concessions are necessary for a deal with the European Parliament.
If the text gains approval on Wednesday, a political trilogue is scheduled for January 30.”
‘French derogation’
In a shy move meant to allay France’s pressing concerns that the December provisional agreement, which is being used as the basis for future negotiations, falls significantly short of expectations, the Belgian presidency brought back a provision that the French have always wanted, known as the ‘French derogation’, in the text’s recitals.
Recitals form the law’s preamble and clarify the meaning of the legal text but do not have the legal value of articles.
This provision touches on the legal presumption of employment, the directive’s flagship mechanism through which self-employed platform workers could be automatically reclassified as full-time employees based on their working relationship with digital platforms.
As it stands, a certain number of criteria, which hint to a subordinate relationship between a platform and a worker, would have to be met for the legal presumption to be triggered.
The ‘French derogation’ introduces a nuance: If a digital platform is bound by national law or agreements with trade unions to behave in a specific manner towards workers, and this conduct automatically satisfies one of the criteria, it is insufficient for that criterion to be considered fulfilled.
In other words, a criterion can only be fullfiled – and possibly trigger the presumption – if the action that hints to subordination arises in the course of worker-platform interactions, or if it is imposed unilaterally in the Terms & Conditions workers are obliged to agree before signing on to a platform.
