The mem­ber states have failed to reach an agree­ment on the Plat­form Work Dir­ect­ive we previously discussed.

On 8 Feb­ru­ary 2024, it was announced that the pre­lim­in­ary agree­ment reached by the European Par­lia­ment and the Coun­cil of the European Uni­on on 13 Decem­ber 2023, was not adop­ted by the mem­ber states after all. As a res­ult, on 8 Feb­ru­ary 2024, the European Par­lia­ment and the Coun­cil of the European Uni­on reached a new pre­lim­in­ary agree­ment. The main dif­fer­ence from the earli­er 13 Decem­ber 2023, agree­ment is that the “work­er” must act­ively invoke the law, rather than auto­mat­ic­ally being con­sidered an employ­ee when the cri­ter­ia for an “employ­ment rela­tion­ship” (which is broad­er than an employ­ment agree­ment) are met. The mem­ber states then needed to vote with a qual­i­fied major­ity on this pro­pos­al before it could form­ally be con­ver­ted into legis­la­tion.

How­ever, this new pre­lim­in­ary agree­ment also failed to achieve the qual­i­fied major­ity needed to adopt the dir­ect­ive. Among oth­ers, France and Ger­many have indic­ated that they still do not sup­port the pro­pos­al.

Since a qual­i­fied major­ity of mem­ber states has once again not been secured, the future of the Plat­form Work Dir­ect­ive is uncer­tain. We will, of course, keep you informed of fur­ther devel­op­ments in this area.

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