Collective Rights, Competition, and Self-Employed Workers in the EU: Recent Developments and Ongoing Problems
Elena Gramano
What the paper says
This article examines the intricate relationship between competition law and collective rights in EU regulations, critically assessing whether and to what extent self-employed workers can exercise collective rights based on the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) case law. Additionally, it considers the European Commission’s recent initiative to acknowledge and expand the collective dimension of self-employed workers. To address the specific collective rights of genuine self-employed workers, the Commission, acting in its capacity as the EU’s competition authority, has taken steps in the Guidelines on the Application of Union Competition Law to Collective Agreements to steer towards a renewed interpretation of the scope of application of Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), with the aim of excluding collective bargaining agreements concluded by or on behalf of certain categories of soloself-employed workers from its scope. In light of this move, the article provides a critical analysis of the Guidelines and evaluates the degree to which the current EU legal framework aligns with fundamental collective rights. while attempting to offer renewed hermeneutical solutions to alter the consolidated line of systematic construction of the relationship between collective rights and competition law.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.