How Social Will Social Europe Be in the 2020s?

Abstract

A. Synergies: Challenges for a New Social Agenda Ursula von der Leyen's political guidelines for the next European Commission 1 place an emphasis on ensuring fair minimum wages within 100 days of her mandate.Differences in minimum wages among Member States of the EU are striking.2 Not only do they reflect the state of the economy, they also indicate different traditions in collective bargaining, which are not easy to overcome.Early in 2019, the German labor minister announced that during the German Presidency, in the second half of 2020, a "European legal framework for minimum wages and minimum income" would be launched.In 2014, in response to a European Council's Recommendation, Germany adopted legislation in this field that was issued within the European Semester's procedural framework.Consequently, salaries enter the scene of delicate institutional balances, despite the fact that an EU competence on such matters is explicitly excluded-Article 153.5.The challenge for the new Commission should consist of proposing synergies among existing measures.This idea can be traced to the Pillar of European Social Rights, 3 an ambitious policy document encompassing different plans and bringing together different international sources.At a time of serious threats for social rights in the EU, the Pillar recalls relevant provisions of EU primary law-including Article 9 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union ("TFEU"), the innovative "horizontal clause," which should lead to the enforcement of rights and principles enshrined in the Charter of fundamental rights-and refers to labor standards provided for in ILO Conventions and in the European Social Charter.This is noteworthy.A convergence of standards strengthens the floor of fundamental rights and prepares the ground-if necessaryfor the intervention of courts.Synergies are meant to contrast the dispersion of legal guarantees and should reassure disillusioned European citizens, who expect rapid answers.The direction taken in the new Directive on transparent and predictable working conditions in the European Union is reassuring, because it bases the first binding legal measure on Principles 5 and 7 of the Pillar, which takes into due account the CJEU's case law on criteria to establish the notion of a worker, in view of expanding the scope of previous secondary law and includes those with unpredictable working patterns and non-standard forms of employment. 4 Programs to support fair wages are an absolute priority.Principle 6 in Chapter II on Fair Working Conditions adopts a language familiar to constitutional principles across Europe.It mentions the adequacy of minimum wages and finalizes it to the satisfaction of essential needs *Judge at the Constitutional Court of Italy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.