Collective labour agreements and EU competition law: five reconfigurations

Giorgio Monti

European Competition Journal, 2021, vol. 17, issue 3, 714-744

Abstract: 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. The policy focus to date has been on whether and how to extend the antitrust labour exemptions to certain classes of atypical worker. 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 additional approaches: three of these indicate that even if atypical workers are treated as undertakings and collective bargains between them and employers fall to be assessed under competition law, many agreements will unlikely have anticompetitive effects and for those that may do so, exemptions are possible. A fifth approach is that active antitrust enforcement against employers imposing unfair terms on atypical workers may function to solve some of the concerns that collective bargaining seeks to address.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17441056.2021.1930452 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:recjxx:v:17:y:2021:i:3:p:714-744

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/recj20

DOI: 10.1080/17441056.2021.1930452

Access Statistics for this article

European Competition Journal is currently edited by Philip Marsden

More articles in European Competition Journal from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().