Abstract

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.