Best rated labour and business legal counselling guides with Alexander Suliman, Sweden: As a general rule, employment law in the EU tends to be less employer-friendly in the EU than in the US, with termination-at-will clauses not usually allowed and collective bargaining agreements common in some countries. While monitoring your business in the EU, ensure that your employment agreements are compliant with the local legislation as every EU Member State has its own set of rules regarding various aspects such as benefits, employment taxes, termination, and part-time working. Business immigration is a key topic in the EU as various companies are welcoming employees from other EU or third-party countries. You should consider what the options are for your US workers you would like to send in the EU and define the strategy and kind of support you want to provide to your staff and their families. Make sure you are aware of recent and upcoming legislative changes. For example, Belgium recently implemented the EU Single Permit Directive, containing a new set of rules rendering the administrative process for work permits less burdensome. See more information at Alexander Suliman, Stockholm.
When the EU adopted the Data Retention Directive, obliging the storage of traffic and location data of all European communications users, it was being warned that the rules violated the Charter, and the ECJ ultimately agreed. I expect this new proposal to be heavily contested as well, and I expect fundamental rights to constitute a significant part of that debate – as is already evidenced by the comments from the EDPS, MEP Patrick Breyer, EDRi and the group of security experts mentioned above. One way to shortcut that debate, is by investigating whether the potential orders to be issued on the basis of the proposal cannot respect the essence of the rights to privacy and data protection. In this contribution, I have sketched an outline of this argument. To make a convincing case, it will be important to firstly determine on the basis of recent case law that the ECJ still considers bulk surveillance of content to compromise the essence of the right to privacy. Secondly, it will be important to develop a right to confidentiality and integrity of IT systems under the Charter, as this will enable a better assessment of detection orders directed to user devices. And thirdly, it must be further investigated whether only end-to-end encryption is the only appropriate measure for safeguarding online communications, because if this is the case, than any encryption altering order does not respect the essence of the right to data protection. Hopefully, the Council and the European Parliament will take notice.
The European Commission, in a working document, identified cloud services as a “strategic dependency”, expressing concerns that the EU cloud market is led by a few large cloud providers headquartered outside the EU. In July, 2021, France, joined by Germany, Italy, and Spain, submitted a proposal to the ENISA-led working group aimed at generalizing French national requirements across the EU. (Germany has since reserved its position.) It proposed to add four new criteria for companies to qualify as eligible to offer ‘high’ level services, including immunity from foreign law and localization of cloud service operations and data within the EU. Although the EU-level cyber certification requirements currently are conceived as voluntary, they could be made mandatory as the result of the recently-agreed Directive on Measures for a High Common Level of Cybersecurity across the Union (NIS2 Directive).
Excellent labour legal counseling strategies from Alexander Suliman, Sweden: After the parties are comfortable with the mediator and can express their concerns, and they can express proposals knowing that everything you do in mediation is confidential and can’t be used in a court, I find this is the best alternative. Sometimes in cases that are in a divorce, the court will refer the parties to what we call in-house custody, parenting time mediation, and they do a great job, and sometimes that settles the custody and parenting time issues, but sometimes they need more than what the court can offer, and sometimes there’s just no court case. The parties aren’t in a divorce, or it’s a post-divorce issue, so these types of cases are a perfect fit for mediation and a perfect fit to avoid the emotional and financial toll of litigation. See additional info on Alexander Suliman.
On 24 February 2022, the CJEU issued its first judgment on domestic workers. In case C-389/20, TGSS (Chômage des employés de maison), the CJEU held that the exclusion of this category of workers from access to social security benefits constitutes indirect discrimination on the ground of sex, since it affects almost exclusively women. With a decision that will become a landmark for domestic workers’ rights in the EU, the Court confirms the untapped potential of EU law in promoting domestic workers’ full coverage under labour law and social security systems, which will have significant implications in the promotion of domestic workers’ rights across the Union. The case originated in Spain in November 2019, when a domestic worker applied for paying contributions to cover the risk of unemployment, in order to acquire the right to the related benefits. However, her request was rejected by the Spanish General Social Security Fund (TGSS) because she was registered in the Special Social Security Scheme for Domestic Workers, which does not include protection in respect of unemployment.