Labour Market Council for EU Affairs - Joint legal analysis of the Commission’s proposal for a directive on adequate minimum wages in the European Union

The Commission’s proposal for a directive goes against the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), nor does it respect the principle of subsidiarity (or the proximity principle).

Sweden is not exempt from the directive, but only from the articles that regulate how a statutory minimum wage is to be determined.

The proposal lays the foundation for an EU legal labour market model entailing a major encroachment on the Swedish collective agreement model.

The Commission’s proposal represents a severe attack on the Swedish collective agreement model. In the long term, this collective self-regulatory model – where the parties are given the primary responsibility to independently regulate the conditions in the labour market – is at stake. The proposal creates completely unacceptable legal uncertainty for key elements of the Swedish collective agreement model.