Social Protection beyond the Employment Contract: the role played by the European Court of Justice

Abstract

The number of non-standard and precarious work arrangements, not falling within the domain of labour law, most recently those prompted by new techonologies (crowdworking, platform work, etc), has been sharply increasing across the member states of the European Union over the last twenty years or so. As this article will argue, the Court of Justice of the European Union, in shaping the scope of EU labour law, has been looking beyond the traditional categories in order to provide some core employment and social rights to atypical work arrangements. This has been done by building a common EU concept of worker, broader than that of ‘employee’ endorsed by national jurisdictions, and by applying it to an increasing body of EU social legislation. In particular, the Court of Justice elaboration has started from the field of the free movement of workers, and then moved to employment protection Directives and eventually to the so-called labour exception to antitrust law. Beyond the extension of the scope of employment and social protection lies a purposive method of interpretation of EU primary and secondary law used by the Court of Justice, facilitated by the new role which the CFREU gained with the Lisbon Treaty and a parallel increasing relevance acquired by the EU social sphere.

Keywords:

EU law, concept of worker, platform worker, labour law, EU directives, interpretation