TILEC Work In Progress: Giorgio Monti

The European Commission has recently begun to reflect on whether competition law is a barrier to the formation of collective labour agreements between industry and atypical workers. This was spurned by the growth of the so-called gig economy. The policy focus to date has been on whether and how to extend the antitrust labour exemption to certain classes of atypical workers. This paper shows how efforts in this direction in the Netherlands and Ireland have revealed that this is a tricky path to pursue. As a result the paper proposes four other types of reconfiguration: three of these suggest that even if atypical workers are treated as undertakings and collective bargains between them and employers fall to be assessed under competition law, many will unlikely have anticompetitive effects and for those that may do so, exemptions are possible. The final reconfiguration is that active antitrust enforcement against employers imposing unfair terms on atypical workers may function to solve the same concerns that collective bargaining seeks to address.  

Speaker: Giorgio Monti

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