In April 2017 and as part of its Social Pillar initiative, the European Commission launched phase one of the European Social Partner consultation process on a revision to Written Statement Directive (Directive 91/533), which aims to ensure that all workers receive written information on their key essential employment conditions including a description of the work as well as the duration of paid leave and the working hours. The social partners were asked to adopt a position on broadening the category of worker that entered the directive’s scope and even maybe changing the text of the directive to cover minimum rights for all workers including independent workers.
The European Trade Union Confederation response. In keeping with the consultation document, the ETUC (full text as yet publicly unavailable) supports both doing away with exceptions concerning casual work, short (under a month) employment contracts and ‘ultra part-time’ employment contracts (under eight hours of work per week), as well as an EU definition of the notion of worker, which currently lies in the hands of the individual Member States. The consultation document in fact proposes including within the directive’s current scope of interns and those working at home, those on zero hour contracts, on call work, and on voucher based work, etc with these being growing forms of employment that are often excluded.
Do you have information to share with us?