The social partners as actors in new labour law legislation in Sweden

This article focuses on the importance of the social partners in new labour law regulation where there is a weak parliamentary majority. The prevailing view in Sweden is that labour law regulation must be modernised as both companies and employees need improved opportunities in order to be able to adapt to changing conditions in the labour market. A Government inquiry and negotiations between the social partners in the private sector focused on these issues. The social partners reached two agreements: a Principle Agreement, including demands that the state provide new labour law regulation; and a Basic Agreement, which is a collective agreement about security, transition and employment protection. The Swedish Government decided to modernise the Swedish Employment Protection Act (LAS) 1 in line with the social partners’ suggestions. The government proposal covers three important labour law areas: (1) changes to the Swedish Employment Protection Act; (2) new state-financed public support for skills development; and (3) a new public transition organisation to provide basic transition support for employees not covered by a collective agreement. This article shows that the social partners have great power over new legislation and can create stability in labour law regulation in Sweden for the future. The government’s proposal implies that new regulation has moved from the provision of employment protection depending on length of service to better transition conditions for employees, and that the state is to take financial responsibility for the lifelong learning of professionals.

Discrimination within a group of workers with disabilities. Comment to Court of Justice of the European Union, Case C-16/19

In January 2021, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered a remarkable judgment regarding the rights of workers with disabilities. The case concerned a Polish employer who decided to grant a monthly allowance to workers with disabilities if such workers provided a disability certificate after a certain date. However, those workers who had submitted their certificates before the specified date, including VL, were not entitled to that allowance. As a result, VL brought an action against the employer before a Polish Court claiming that she had been discriminated against due to her disability. The aim of the following note is to raise awareness regarding some of the main points of the argumentative rhetoric of the Court of Justice.

Platform Work in Europe: The need for a multilevel solution to protect the so-called self-employed

To protect the so-called self-employed, a multilevel solution is needed. Requalification is a first step and to do this, a broad definition of the employment agreement and the presumption of an employment agreement in some situations, is useful. But even then, a clear distinction between bogus self-employed and real entrepreneurs is sometimes difficult to make and requalification for the self-employed who work for individuals is problematic. Working on the base of a service contract gives some protection and besides that, protection for all working people is needed, such as, for example, a financial contribution in case of disability.

Economic Dependence and Parental Protection: A Comparative Analysis of Austrian and Slovenian Labour and Social Security Rights of Economically Dependent Self-Employed Parents

Taking parental protection rights as a clear-cut field of study, this article argues that there are significant protection gaps in the social rights and employment protection of the economically dependent self-employed. Their exclusion from employment protection can be justified as far as the protective purpose is tied to the personal subordination of the employee relationship. However, certain vulnerabilities arise not from personal, but from economic dependency, whereas the changing labour market and the growing area of precarious self-employment must be considered. Comparing the rights of working parents in Slovenia and Austria, we distinguish between employees and economically dependent self-employed persons in this specific area and point to challenges for the wider field of labour and social rights. The purposes of parental protection rights are diverse; they include health protection, guarantee social security and serve equal treatment purposes. Therefore, they represent an ideal field to discuss arguments regarding the inclusion or exclusion of the economically dependent self-employed into different protective frameworks.

Economic Security & the Regulation of Gig Work in California: From AB5 to Proposition 22

Employment is the primary legal and political means to address economic inequality in the United States. With the evisceration of the welfare state, employment is also key to democratic outcomes. Despite this, self-employed work deployed by labour platforms like Uber has grown in recent years. What can we learn from worker demands and recent regulatory attempts to clarify and extend who is covered by employment protections? Based on a decade of legal and ethnographic research in the state of California, I situate the legal and regulatory history of labour platform work in the context of platform workers’ experiences and responses to the insecurities and poverty promulgated by their putative status as independent contractors. In highlighting this history, I argue that self-organised labour platform workers were critical to the passage of a state law (AB5) that would have forced companies to treat them as employees—with access to predictable living wages, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and health insurance, among other safety net protections. Finally, I show how, leveraging tremendous structural and instrumental power, the major labour platform companies, in the middle of the global Coronavirus pandemic, sponsored a successful referendum on AB5, and lay out the anti-democratic implications of the referendum's passage.

‘Platformisation’ of Work: An EU Perspective on Introducing a Legal Presumption

For some time now, the European Commission has stressed the need to address the ongoing misclassification of employment status in platform work and has thus considered introducing a rebuttable presumption of employment status or a reversal of the burden of proof. This contribution focuses on the benefits and limitations of introducing a rebuttable legal presumption in EU labour law as an evidentiary means to improve the working conditions of platform workers. In doing so, some general remarks on rebuttable legal presumptions will be made, while also offering some comparative legal insights, before exploring their potential benefits and limitations in the context of EU labour law in general and platform work in particular. This contribution will finish with an analysis of how such a presumption could be integrated in the current EU social acquis.

Collective redress and workers’ rights in Slovenia

In 2017, the Collective Actions Act introduced a new type of lawsuit – the collective action – into the Slovenian legal order. A collective action can be lodged in cases of instances of so-called ‘mass harm’, including mass violations of workers’ rights. This could improve the effectiveness of enforcement of workers’ rights in practice. Instead of a number of individual labour disputes concerning the same or similar violations of workers’ rights, a collective action can be lodged by trade unions or other representative collective actors in this field. Both opt-in and opt-out approaches are possible and the decision on this is left to the discretion of the court. Despite many positive aspects, only one collective action in the area of labour rights has been lodged to date. In this contribution I analyse legal regulation of the existing collective redress mechanism and possible reasons for deficiencies discerned in its functioning in practice.

Algorithmic pricing: A concern for platform workers?

Technological developments have been bringing about changes in the field of work since time immemorial. Recently, the emergence of platform work has brought up all kind questions. For instance, in the field of labour law, where the questions seem to focus mostly on the topic legal status of platform workers contract: is the platform worker an employee? At the same time, it is also interesting to examine what it means if it turns out the platform worker is not an employee. In that case, other issues arise, albeit in the area of competition law. In particular, one can think of the consequences of the use of algorithms in determining the tariff of the service. In this article, I examine the consequences competition law has for the platform and individual platform workers. These consequences are nuanced and depend on the specific business model. However, it does not seem to be excluded those involved could face sanctions for a breach of competition law.

United we stand, divided we sue: Collective access to court for labour and social security claims in Sweden

While Sweden has long enjoyed a solid reputation for protecting weaker parties through a comprehensive welfare state and a labour market governed by collective bargaining, its system for enforcing these rights has rested upon the public authorities and the social partners rather than on judicial proceedings. Against this background, this article examines the legal avenues for bringing collective actions and obtaining collective redress before courts in social security and labour law cases in Sweden. It finds that the relevant legislation does not explicitly provide for collective redress in either field. Within social security law, collective access to court is practically excluded, whereas in labour law, the current procedural framework can only with difficulty be construed as lending itself to measures of collective redress, and then only with some significant legal and practical limitations. While indicative of the general situation as regards collective redress in Sweden, whose legislation on group actions has been criticised for its toothlessness and has been put to little practical use, this also suggests that the tradition of collectivism in the Swedish social security and labour market systems still does not translate into collectivism in judicial redress.