Reporting period: 1 April - 30 June 2021: Report on European Labour and Social Security Law
The sixth edition of the HSI Report addresses current developments in case law and legal policy at European level in the 2nd quarter of 2021.
The CJEU has once again passed some decisions of practical relevance in the recent past. One of them is the applicable social security system in the case of cross-border assignment of temporary agency workers (C-784/19 - Team Power Europe). The new requirements of the CJEU put a stop to the "forum shopping" of temporary-work agencies that establish themselves in a Member State with favourable (low) social security contributions in order to lend their employees to user untertakings in other Member States.
The Court also dealt with the law on fixed-term contracts in several judgments. In the Tesco Stores case, it strengthened the principle of equal pay for women and men by interpreting the concept of "work of equal value" in Article 157 TFEU. Equal treatment of men and women in the field of social security is the subject of the decision in INSS, which concerns a maternity allowance in the case of voluntary early retirement. In Braathens Regional Aviation, the Grand Chamber held that a claim for a declaration of discrimination must be (further) examined even if a claim for damages has been admitted but the underlying discrimination has not been acknowledged. Furthermore, in the case Rapidsped, the Advocate General delivered its opinion concerning the posting of lorry drivers and the related payment of daily allowances and fuel-saving allowances. The CJEU has recently endorsed the findings (judgment of 8 July 2021, to be presented in the next HSI Report).
The focus of the ECtHR's case law is the decision in Halet v. Luxembourg (No. 21884/18) on whistleblowing. The background is the "Lux-Leaks" financial scandal. An employee of the tax consultancy PwC had passed on tax documents to the media in this context and was therefore criminally prosecuted.
In addition to this decision, two other judgements of the ECtHR deserve special attention. The case Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) and Norwegian Transport Workers' Federation (NTF) v. Norway (No. 45487/17) deals with the legality of an industrial action also in relation to the fundamental economic freedoms of the EU; the EFTA Court was also involved with an opinion for the national courts. In Melike v. Turkey (No. 35786/19), a public sector employee was dismissed for confirming critical posts on various Facebook pages with the "Like" button.