Keywords: European social dialogue; Collective agreements; European Commission; EPSU.
The article addresses current issues and relevant prospects of European
social dialogue (ESD). It examines the decline of the statutory-agreements
and the simultaneous advance of the autonomous agreements.
The main issue addressed in the central part of the essay concerns
the Commission’s power to propose the agreement to the Council for its
implementation. Indeed, both the “Better Regulation Packageµ (which
introduced the “impact assessmentµ in regard of requests to implement
collective agreements) and the Judgment of the General Court in the
EPSU case have reinterpreted the Treaty’s provisions on the ESD (articles
152, 154, 155 TFEU) with the aim of supporting the Commission’s full discretion to approve the agreements’ legislative statutory implementation
or to reject it.
The final part of the article is dedicated to the strengths of the autonomous
agreements to which the development prospects of the European
Social Dialogue seem to be linked.