Not really working On 21 November 2023, the UK Supreme Court delivered its long-awaited decision in the Deliveroo case. The judgment, concluded that the Deliveroo riders organised and represented by trade union IWGB were not in an ‘employment relationship’ for the purposes of Article 11 of the ECHR. Fatal to this claim was, in particular,…
An armed conflict has always a severe impact on civilians in their role as workers, and on workplaces. Of particular concern are violations of fundamental labour rights, such as the prohibition of forced or compulsory labour, contained in the ILO Forced Labour Convention No. 29 and its Protocol of 2014, and in the Abolition of…
Background The proposed EU directive on improving working conditions in platform work is the first legislative initiative that attempts to regulate the use of AI, in the form of algorithmic management, in the workplace. This innovative legislative proposal pursues a double goal: first, correcting the employment status of people working in digital labour platforms and…
Introduction Romanian labour law has developed very dynamically in recent years. Its development curve could be described in key words which, at first somewhat belatedly, are nowadays becoming more and more dominant in line with international trends. One of these key words was flexicurity, which was the main theme of the most significant amendment to…
The inclusion of persons with a disability has always been a sensitive issue in the mechanisms of protection and (equal) access in the labor market. Due to allegedly reduced performance, persons with a disability are often considered “second-class workers” (rather than resources) and, as a result, they have been relegated to tasks of secondary importance…
The increasing and pervasive use of digital technology in the workplace is accompanied by a growing perception that the current regulatory and definitional frameworks used by legal systems to allocate obligations and protections in labour relations are becoming obsolete and inadequate. The rarefaction of labour law notions This inadequacy is evident in the diminishing significance…
The world of work is changing. In this context, the lines that divide self-employed and employed persons are becoming less and less discernible. This phenomenon has led to the numerical increase of dependent self-employed persons who find themselves in a comparable predicament to that of employees, where their weak negotiating position and economic dependency on…
On 9 May 2022, the report on the final outcome of the Conference on the Future of Europe, which contained 49 proposals and 320 targetted measures, also in the area of employment and social policy, was presented to the Presidents of the European Parliament (the Parliament), the Council of the European Union (the Council) and…
To what extent, if any, will employers permit hybrid working? Hybrid working involves a split of time for workers performing their duties at the employer’s business location and their own homes (though it is possible to work from another location). This is the concept of remote working discussed here. Remote work may also be discussed…
A growing body of research is devoted to in-work poverty. This should not come as a surprise. If poverty was long perceived as a problem associated with worklessness, the stubborn reality of high rates of poverty among workers in poor countries and the increasing inequalities in the growth of earnings in richer countries has changed…
