IR Notes

It is traditional in the press to celebrate publication numbers that reach a round figure. So here is your IR Notes newsletter, founded in 2014, and now “celebrating” its 100th edition! We said that we wanted to report the news in the field of European social affairs, in a way that is accessible to those engaged in social dialogue, especially within multinational companies, and that’s precisely what we’ve done! Once a fortnight, IR Notes informs and educates more than 1,000 readers across the European Union.

IR Notes exists to provide a brief and educational overview of developments in European social affairs, presented in English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian since the start of 2018, with a view to facilitating exchanges concerning European practice in this area. We want IR Notes to be a tool that will help turn the idea of “a social Europe” into a reality, because this project will come to fruition through the efforts of the actors engaged in building it, at all levels.

IR Notes is written by a team of industrial relations experts from EU Member States. It is coordinated by Frédéric Turlan, who trained as an expert in employment law, and has almost 20 years’ experience in the field of social legislation and industrial relations in Europe. In IR Notes, he decodes key information, while at the same time trying to make it comprehensible to a wide audience. The newsletter is translated by professional translators: the BENAVIDES agency (English, German), CIT (Spanish) and Rosanna Gasbarro (Italian).

IR Notes is published by IR Share, a totally independent private company, which has no links whatsoever to any employers’ organisations or trade unions, nor to any political groupings, think tanks or commercial companies that might want to offer products or services to the readers of IR Notes. IR Notes is reliant solely on the resources it raises through subscriptions. This independence guarantees that the publication provides unbiased information, with no agenda other than that of promoting social dialogue and social innovation.

When you subscribe to IR Notes, you’re not simply purchasing a product. Via IR Notes, we want to facilitate the exchange of ideas between people who are interested in European social practices, over and above any political, trade union or linguistic differences. Each collective subscription includes all of the available languages. When you subscribe to IR Notes, you’re helping to provide everyone with a competitively-priced tool for monitoring social affairs, and to take a step closer towards offering further languages. IR Notes is a participatory tool, to which every reader can contribute by sending information to the editor (frederic.t@irshare.eu) or by uploading documents (agreements, etc.) to the IR Share website.

We’d really like to include the languages spoken in the countries of Eastern Europe, but each language represents an additional translation and thus a substantial extra cost, given that we insist on work of impeccable quality. We would also like to offer more interviews. In addition, we plan to present other material, notably via video or creating a publication. We’re interested to hear your opinion, and invite you to send us your suggestions (frederic.t@irshare.eu).

IR Notes is sold exclusively by subscription, taken out either individually on the IR Share website, or as part of a collective subscription taken out, for example, by a company’s management or a European Works Council on behalf of its members.

The hypertext links take you to the source documents cited in the articles. These links take you either to the source’s own website, or to the IR Share website to whose database the document has been uploaded. Where possible, the links take you to a document in the chosen language, and by default to the English language version.

To access documents on the IR Share website, you have to register on the site and create an account (there is no charge). You can then download the documents you want, some of which are restricted to IR Notes subscribers.

Dear reader, you’re our Marketing Department! If you like IR Notes, please tell people about it on social media! We would be grateful if you could suggest the names of people we could contact, who might be interested in IR Notes and subscribing to it. We therefore rely on you to guarantee our independence and our development. We need you.

Since the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force, you must have been inundated with messages concerning the protection of your personal data! We’re taking advantage of this 100th edition to tell you how IR Share gathers and processes your personal data (see left-hand column).

• Boosting the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund: As part of the EU 2021-2027 draft budget, in a proposal for a regulation dated 30 May, the European Commission proposed to maintain the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund, which provides European funds to finance measures that will help employees who lose their jobs as a result of a large-scale collective redundancy (more than 500 job losses), to return to work. The plan is for the fund – criticised over many years on account of its low uptake rate (it took around 10 years to spend the equivalent value of just one year of its 500 million euros budget line) – to be not just maintained, but expanded, so as to include all restructurings (without having to prove that they are related to “globalisation” or “the crisis”) and those affecting at least 250 employees (rather than 500, as at present) within a company, a chain of companies (e.g. a principal and its subcontractors) or a particular sector of activity. Despite this expansion, the Fund’s annual budget is to be cut from 500 to 200 million euros. For comparison purposes, the Fund granted 51 million euros worth of aid in 2015 and 2016, i.e. far less than the proposed ceiling.

• Fixed-term contracts: The Court of Justice has issued a ruling in two Spanish cases relating to specific fixed-term contracts (Cases C-574/16 and C-677/16). One of them permits the employment of a person temporarily (contrato d’interinidad) while the selection or promotion procedure to fill the post permanently takes place, and the other allows employers to cover the working hours no longer covered as a result of the worker taking partial retirement (a “relief” contract). When their contracts were terminated, the employees challenged the fact that they had received either no severance payment or a payment that was lower than that received by a worker on a contract of indefinite duration when their contract of employment was terminated on objective grounds. In the opinion of the Court, this difference in treatment is not a violation of EU legislation on fixed-term employment.

• A charter to protect workers employed in the gig economy: While scrutinising a bill, members of the French parliament, with the government’s support, tabled an amendment to provide protection for online platform workers and legal security for companies. These companies might introduce a charter setting out the “the rights and obligations” of both the platform and its workers. The charter is expected to guarantee “the non-exclusive nature of the relationship between the worker and the platform”, to ensure that workers receive “decent remuneration”, and to contain “occupational risk prevention measures” and “rules applicable in the event of a breakdown in contractual relationships”. The charter’s application would mean that companies would no longer run the risk of contractual relationships in employment contracts being reclassified.

Ban on strike action for civil servants: On 12 June, the German Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) issued a judgment that denies civil servants, and in this case teachers, the right to strike (see press release, in English). With this judgment, which contradicts European Court of Human Rights case law, the Court invokes a specific aspect of German law.
> see also Süddeutsche Zeitung article posted by Professor Alain Supiot.

A court holds that food delivery riders are self-employed workers: On 7 May 2018, the Turin court published the judgment setting out the grounds on which it had rejected the claim brought against the German group Foodora by six workers delivering food to people’s homes on their bicycles, to be recognised as employees. These particular riders had been dismissed by the company after refusing to accept a change in the terms of their remuneration. They were applying for the termination of their contract to be declared in breach of redundancy legislation, and for payment of compensation on the grounds of a breach of the legislation covering prevention of accidents at work and protection of privacy. The fact that each delivery rider was entitled to either accept or decline individual assignments via the company app, proved decisive in the court’s decision to confirm that these workers should be classified as self-employed, since they were linked to the company by “coordinated and ongoing collaboration contracts” (“parasubordination”). Even though workers who had agreed to accept a particular delivery were subject to a time constraint and may also have been subject to supervision exerted remotely, this did not, in the court’s view, correspond to methods of exercising management and supervision powers akin to subordination of the type applicable to employees, but rather to a method of “coordination” that was compatible with self-employed work. And based on the same thinking, being “incorrectly classified” could not be categorised as a disciplinary sanction.

• Reclassification of a self-employed person as a “worker”: On 13 June, the UK Supreme Court delivered a judgment in the case of a plumber and heating engineer, Gary Smith (pictured), who had worked on a self-employed basis for a London plumbing company for almost six years (see press release). Having been dismissed by the company after suffering a heart attack, he went to court to seek recognition as an employee, which would entitle him to certain employment protection rights. The employment tribunal and the Court of Appeal took the view that he could not be classed as an employee, but should be regarded not as self-employed, but as a worker. This hybrid status in British law grants “workers” a number of social rights. Following an analysis of the respective contractual obligations of both parties, the Supreme Court confirmed this reclassification as a “worker” which, as a consequence, entitles Mr. Smith to claim back-payment of statutory annual leave and a refund of certain deductions from his wages, as well as the right to take legal action for disability discrimination. In spite of this decision by the Supreme Court, the question of employment status will continue to be argued on a case-by-case basis, points out Joanne Moseley of the law firm Irwin Mitchell. Whereas the plumbing company’s boss considered the decision to be out of step with 21st century realities and threatened to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights, Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) commented that “it’s time to end the Wild West in the gig economy”.
  > see also articles from the BBC and the Guardian.

Asahi Breweries Europe Group: The management of Asahi Breweries Europe Group (ABEG), the European subsidiary of the Japanese brewer Asahi, and a special negotiating body advised by the European trade union federation Effat have signed an agreement on the creation of a European Works Council for the businesses it acquired from the ABinbev group in 2017 (see Effat press release). ABEG, which has its head office in Prague, has around 10,000 employees in the EU, predominantly in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia. Asahi also has another subsidiary in Europe – PGM Business – which occupies the sites acquired from SABMiller in 2017, and, here too, negotiations are under way to create a European Works Council. The agreement’s provisions include: 1. the presence of an Effat representative at all meetings; 2. recourse to expert advice costing up to 10,000 euros a year (including travel and accommodation costs), though this figure can be increased in exceptional circumstances; 3. a very clear consultation process, the length of which is to be determined jointly by the management and the European Works Council, on an ad hoc basis, depending on the scale of the project submitted to the European Works Council.

• Adecco Group: The global market leader in human resources services, Adecco Group (15,200 employees in the EU + Switzerland), has renewed its European Works Council agreement. Note: Brexit is taken into account at two levels: the agreement is concluded under the auspices of the British transposition law, but if EU legislation covering European Works Councils were to cease to apply to the United Kingdom, then the Swiss group’s management will appoint another management body within the EU to host the European Works Council. The agreement also explicitly includes Switzerland and the United Kingdom in its scope of application. The agreement provides for one representative per country plus additional members from the “Top 5” ranked countries in terms of business revenue (France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Spain), up to a limit of 30 members. The agreement also contains a dispute resolution clause with the option of appointing a mediator prior to any litigation.


• Imerys: The management of the Imerys group (18,300 employees), a global market leader in mineral-based specialities for industry, has renewed its European Works Council agreement, first signed in 2001. The agreement provides in particular for the creation of specialised working parties and an information disclosure procedure where a project affects only one country. In this case, the management will inform the secretary of the European Works Council and the accredited committee member representing the country impacted by the operation, either by email or by telephone. On the other hand, where the operation affects more than 300 employees, management will convene an extraordinary meeting of the select committee to pass the information on to it.
  > see also European Works Council agreements published on line by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), for Wolters Kluwer (renewal of 2016 agreement) and Seiko Epson (September 2017)

• Lukoil: On 4 June, the management of the Russian oil and gas group Lukoil (100,000 employees) and the IndustriAll Global Union international trade union federation ratified the renewal of their global framework agreement. This agreement was first signed in 2004 and was last renewed in 2012 (see IndustriAll press release).


• EDF: The EDF group’s framework agreement on social responsibility, reported on in IR Notes 99, is now online in French. The Italian and Dutch versions are available on request (frederic.t@irshare.eu).

DXC Technology: On 11 June, the Belgian-based employees of the American IT services group DXC staged a demonstration in front of the DXC group’s regional headquarters at La Défense near Paris. The Secretary of the European Works Council was also in attendance. According to the Belgian SETCa FGTB trade union, DXC’s management in Mechelen had announced a plan to systematically replace most of its workers over the age of 45 with young graduates. DXC Technology has 137,000 employees and was formed as the result of the merger, in 2017, of CSC and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

• Ryanair: On 11 June, the low-cost airline Ryanair announced that it had formally recognised the Unite trade union as the representative of its cabin crew in the United Kingdom (see press releases from Ryanair and UNITE).

Overview of respect for employment rights: The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has published its fifth annual report on respect for employment rights around the world (ITUC Global Rights 2018). The report notes “a decline in respect for tripartite social dialogue” in Europe and quoted France as an example. Croatia, Spain and Poland are also criticised for other reasons. Workers “have continued to suffer from the long-lasting negative effects of austerity measures that have all but dismantled the existing collective bargaining frameworks” emphasises the ITUC, “especially in countries affected by the policies of the Troika, such as Portugal, Spain and Greece”. The ITUC index ranks 142 countries on a scale of 1 to 5, based on the extent of their respect for workers’ rights. Violations are recorded every year from April to March. The categories are: sporadic violations (category 1), repeated violations (2), regular (3), systematic (4), no rights guaranteed (5) due to a breakdown of the rule of law (5+).