Trade unions strive towards a Europe in which working conditions and pay allow people to live in dignity. On World Day for Decent Work, the ETUC highlights three urgent measures to ensure no worker is left behind: strengthening collective bargaining, enforcing the rights of people working through online platforms and requiring all internships to be paid.
Europe needs a pay rise
People in Europe need a pay rise. Fuelled by corporate greed, prices of everyday goods and services have skyrocketed. Increased corporate profits have been redistributed away from workers and have been captured instead by CEOs and shareholders. As a result, dividend payouts to shareholders are increasing 13 times faster than wages.
Collective bargaining is the main tool with which workers can claim a fair share. In order to rebalance the scales, the ETUC is calling on the European Union institutions and on national governments to promote social dialogue and workers’ ability to bargain collectively in their unions.
Ending platform loopholes
People who work via digital platforms are often the most at risk of being left behind. Corporations using digital platforms have been allowed to use their novelty as a smokescreen to dodge employer responsibilities. Across Europe, millions of people – delivery workers, taxi drivers but also care and domestic workers, IT workers and maintenance workers – are systematically pushed into bogus self-employment and stripped of their rights.
The EU has a major role to play. As the European Parliament, Council and Commission come together in their trilogue negotiations to finalise the Platform Work Directive, the ETUC is pushing for the legislation to: establish the presumption of employment, , to push platforms to engage in collective bargaining, and place the burden of proof on corporations .
Banning unpaid internships
Young people are being exploited as cheap and even unpaid labour. Internships act as a barrier, in particular for people of lower-income backgrounds, who cannot rely on family resources to sustain their decisive early professional experience. Discriminated against because of their age, young people too often find themselves trapped in endless precarious work, and cannot access equal and quality opportunities to integrate the labour market.
The ETUC is turning up the pressure and engaging actively in the social partners' consultation, calling for the Commission to come up with the Directive to ban unpaid internship and to do so, before the end of its current mandate.
All workers, regardless of their age, type of contract or sector where they work in, deserve decent working conditions, adequate salary and a right to exercise their trade union rights. On World Day for Decent Work, and every day, trade unions will continue the fight for a fair deal for workers.