EU: agreement on the draft directive on adequate minimum wages

During night session negotiations on 07 June, the EU Council and European Parliament validated the draft directive on adequate minimum wages in the European Union (c.f. article No.12199). Both institutions must now formally vote to confirm this provisional agreement, which, once adopted, should then contribute to helping ‘to achieve decent working and living conditions for European employees’. EU Member States already operating with legal minimum wages (c.f. article No.12854 and No.13080) will then have two years to transpose the directive into national law. While the agreement does not set any specific financial amount, it does provide that statutory minimum wages must be revalued at least every two years, unless countries use an automatic indexation mechanism, whereupon this period can be extended to at most four years. The text also specifies that the social partners must be involved in the procedures for setting and updating statutory minimum wages. Furthermore, the institutions agreed that where collective bargaining coverage is below a threshold of 80%, Member States should establish an action plan to promote collective bargaining in order to promote collective bargaining and steadily increase its coverage.