Luxembourg champions the rights of freelancers working on digital platforms

This was more or less stated by Labor Minister Georges Engel at a meeting of the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council in Brussels. According to the minister, right now freelancers working on digital platforms are far from equal in rights to participants in the «traditional» economy.

This needs to be corrected: in the European Union, 28 million people are engaged in such work. And by 2025 there will be 43 million. The defeat in the labor rights for such a huge category of people is simply unacceptable for the region.

In this regard, the minister demanded that in the future, the same labor standards are applied for workers on digital platforms as for other workers. He also noted that in order to protect labor rights, joint responsibility of the platforms themselves and their intermediaries is needed.

As for the amendments that the Council adopted during the meeting, Georges Engel called those insufficiently ambitious for the EU and Luxembourg in particular. At the same time, the minister welcomed the proposed directive on the protection of workers from the risks associated with exposure to asbestos. Engel noted that the proposals in this directive are larger and more useful than those originally proposed by the European Commission.