Minimum Wages Directive and Beyond: Workers’ Dignity Taken (Almost) Seriously

Abstract This study argues that the Minimum Wages Directive reveals a shift in the Union’s political-economic approach to the social competition in the Single Market, which introduces a creeping extension of the Treaty’s scope and a potential enlargement of the Union’s competences on social matters. While representing a timid starting point for the right to a minimum wage protection, it recognises that the dumping wages phenomena are partly triggered by an (unresolved) structural legal vacuum. By analysing the instrumental function of the fair remuneration towards human dignity, the idea of the right to fair and just working conditions as an open scoped right is advanced; the thesis of a general Union competence on working conditions is finally proposed. The aim is to illustrate what limits and perspectives the European upward social convergence is currently facing, and to what extent the Union is not necessarily a mere reflection of market completion interests.