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Globalisation and changes in the way multinationals are organised mean that, increasingly, strategic decisions affecting workers are taken in another country. While European Works Councils are supposed to ensure that workers' voices are heard in transnational decision-making, weaknesses have been identified in the existing EU rules. As the European Commission does not plan to address these through legislation, Parliament will vote during its January I plenary session on a legislative-initiative report ...

Most migrants arrive in Europe legally, to work, study or join family members. Over a million of the first residence permits granted to non-EU third-country nationals in 2019 were for work purposes. The EU shares competence on legal migration with Member States but can set conditions for third-country nationals' entry into and legal residence in Member States. However, Member States retain the right to determine admission numbers for third-country nationals seeking work. The Single Permit Directive ...

Executive Vice-President Dombrovskis and Commissioners Schmit and Gentiloni have been invited to an Economic Dialogue on the launch of the 2023 European Semester, in line with the relevant EU law. This briefing note covers the main elements of the 2023 European Semester Package proposed by the Commission. It gives also an overview of the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the Stability and the Growth Pact, the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure, the Joint Employment Guidelines ...

In September 2021, the special Eurobarometer 516 survey on European citizens' knowledge and attitudes towards science and technology found that 86 % of citizens think that science and technology exert an overall positive influence on society. Whilst the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the importance of scientific research as a provider of solutions to global challenges, it has also exemplified the capacity of scientific communities to accelerate scientific research cooperation, including through ...

Wage policy in the EU is a patchwork of different national traditions and legal frameworks. As a result, minimum wage levels diverge considerably, and leave many workers unprotected. While setting minimum wages is the competence of EU Member States, the EU has a supporting and complementary role. In October 2020, the European Commission proposed a directive seeking to improve the adequacy and increase the coverage of minimum wages, while also strengthening collective bargaining as the main instrument ...

The IA demonstrates convincingly that the directive's fragmented implementation, which has led to complex procedures and unclear rights, is a regulatory failure that needs addressing. However, the problem definition fails to state explicitly that Member States seem to have prioritised national migration schemes over the EU single permit. Moreover, there is no 'real' range of options: the preferred option 3 (out of three options in addition to the baseline) is the only one that addresses the problems ...

The European Political Community (EPC) held its inaugural meeting on 6 October in Prague, bringing together on an equal footing the leaders of the EU's 27 Member States and 17 other European countries. French President Emmanuel Macron had called for the creation of the EPC after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, to serve as a forum for political dialogue and cooperation on security, stability and prosperity. Its first gathering, attended by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and ...

To raise awareness of the many forms of human trafficking and to boost efforts to address them, the European Union has set 18 October as EU Anti-trafficking Day. Marking the day represents an opportunity to stress the need to tackle trafficking for the purpose of labour exploitation. On the rise, this latter has become the predominant form of trafficking in human beings in some EU Member States.

There is a broad consensus about the deterioration of democracy and human rights across the world due, among other things, to growing authoritarianism, the coronavirus pandemic, deepening economic inequalities, new trends in artificial intelligence, and increasingly severe conflicts. This deterioration has taken place amidst rising impunity, i.e. the impossibility of bringing the perpetrators of violations to account. Tackling impunity globally is therefore an urgent task, as highlighted in several ...

Platform work is an umbrella concept covering a heterogeneous group of economic activities completed through a digital platform. As platform workers' rights are not enshrined in EU labour law, this increasingly leads to problems related to various aspects of their work and human development. To remedy this situation, the European Commission has submitted a proposal for a directive aimed at improving the working conditions of platform workers, clarifying their employment status, and supporting the ...