Working Conditions Directive: new bureaucratic burdens threaten

The Ministry of Labor has presented a draft bill to implement the EU Working Conditions Directive. The ZDH fears additional bureaucratic burdens for small and medium-sized businesses.

This article is part of the special feature on bureaucratic madness in the skilled trades.

In June 2019, the European Parliament and the Council adopted the Directive on transparent and predictable working conditions in the European Union in the area of ​​civil law (Working Conditions Directive), proposed by the European Commission . This directive aims to strengthen the rights of all workers across Europe . It seeks to promote transparent and predictable employment while ensuring the adaptability of the labor market.

The core of the directive is the expansion of employers' obligation to provide information on the essential aspects of the employment relationship. This also includes the establishment of minimum requirements for working conditions with regard to maximum probationary periods , multiple employment , minimum predictability of work , requests for a transition to a different form of employment , and mandatory training . Targeted enforcement provisions are intended to ensure that employees actually benefit from the new rules in their workplaces.

No one-to-one implementation

Statement: Here you will find the detailed statement from the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts (ZDH). Member States must transpose the directive into national law by the end of this year at the latest. The Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs presented a draft bill to this effect in mid-January of this year . The German Confederation of Skilled Crafts reviewed the draft and issued its statement almost a month later . According to the ZDH, the amendments planned by the Ministry primarily affect the Employment Verification Act and certain provisions of the Vocational Training Act , the Skilled Crafts Code , the Temporary Employment Act , the Trade Regulation Code , and the Part-Time and Fixed-Term Employment Act. The ZDH states that the Ministry is "essentially" implementing the requirements of the Working Conditions Directive with this draft. However, despite the only selective legal amendments, the Ministry is going beyond the requirements of the directive and "thus abandoning the principle of a purely one-to-one transposition of European regulations into German law."

BillThe main provisions of the BMAS draft include the following aspects:

• Extension of the employer’s obligations to provide information on the essential aspects of the employment relationship, as already provided for in the Evidence Directive,
• Standardisation of minimum requirements for working conditions with regard to the maximum length of the probationary period, multiple employment and the minimum predictability of work in the case of on-call work,
• Establishment of formal requirements for requests for a transition to another form of work,
• Regulations on compulsory training.
Source: ZDH

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The German Confederation of Skilled Crafts (ZDH) fears additional bureaucratic burdens for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – especially those without their own legal or human resources departments. The new law would make employment contracts more complex and significantly restrict the freedom of contract between the parties. "The establishment of new legal standards for contractual relationships between employers and employees not only means a considerable increase in workload for businesses when implementing the new regulations, but also often leads to significant legal uncertainty in day-to-day operations," warns the ZDH.

Unused scope

The European legislator already stipulates an expansion of employers' information obligations when concluding and amending employment contracts in the directive. The Ministry of Labor's proposal goes even further, imposing additional obligations . However, the EU directive also calls on member states to avoid financial or legal burdens that could hinder the establishment and growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With the additional information obligations it proposes, the Ministry of Labor is not complying with this requirement. This overcompliance is contrasted by the inconsistent use of the flexibility afforded by the European directive.

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