Ruhr-University Bochum
Fellow at CAIS from October 2019 to March 2020
EU legislation in the field of labour law dates largely from before digitalization conquered the economy, the labour market, and society as a whole. This research project focuses on how existing regulation meets the requirements of the digital economy, and what regulations are still required. A good example here is the transparency directive.
Directive 2019/1152 on transparent and predictable working conditions is one of the first legal acts to address the new requirements resulting from digitalization. As a successor to the 1991 information directive, the transparency directive initially contains provisions regarding information. New to the 2019 directive, however, are minimum requirements on working conditions, which serve primarily to regulate new and atypical employment relationships. The central regulatory problem identified by the legislator is therefore the uncertainty and lack of predictability of working conditions, with the EU legislator relying primarily on information as a protective instrument, and determining only individual external limits when it comes to the contractual agreement.
Unlike the Commission draft, the transparency directive adopted does not contain a definition of the term “employee”. The regulation indicates the boundary between employees and self-employed persons in only a rudimentary way. However, the way that the boundary is drawn has taken on a new practical significance in the digital world of work, and especially in the platform economy.
