Hello and welcome to ETIWI podcast, Voices on the World of Work.

I'm your host, Bianca Luna Fabrice, and in this episode we'll be hearing all about the adequate

minimum wages directive with Esther Lynch, Deputy General Secretary of the European

Trade Union Confederation and Torsten Mueller, senior researcher here at the ETII.

Okay, well, thank you so much. Esther and Torsten for being with me and with us today.

And I think we can actually start with a very basic question.

What is the directive on adequate minimum wages and what does it entail?

So good morning, Bianca. The directive on adequate minimum wages and what does it entail? So good morning Bianca, the

directive on adequate minimum wages is a piece of law that will mean that member states have an

obligation to check that the minimum wages, their statutory minimum wages that they pay to people

are adequate.

And then there's lots of provisions setting out what that means.

Importantly, it also recognises that the only way wages are ever going to be truly adequate and fair

is to make sure that they're collectively bargained wages. So making sure that workers can join a union

and can have their right to collectively bargain for a fair wage recognized. And it does that in a

couple of different ways. So really what this is, it's a law about increasing wages in Europe.

Okay, brilliant. Thank you so much, Esther. I have another question for you and it might sound a bit stupid, but it's not entirely maybe clear to me and maybe also for some of our

listeners. What role did the ETUC have in this process?

The main role of the ETUC in this process was lobbying very hard to make sure that the provisions

would actually bring about a real change for working people.

There's always a risk when new laws are being made that they're very well-intentioned,

but they don't work in practice.

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