Platform work is a new umbrella concept which covers a heterogeneous group of economic activities performed through digital platforms. Effective collective rights and bargaining would be essential for platform workers due to their vulnerable employment status. Yet collective organization of platform workers is troublesome, so trade unions face difficulties. The protection of the labour law directives is limited by their personal scope, which may be gradually expanded by the broad ECJ interpretation of the ‘worker’ concept. The effective right to collective bargaining would be particularly important, but it is restricted by EU antitrust rules with an exemption only for employees. In the last decade, the European Court has moved towards a wider personal scope of collective bargaining by interpreting the concept of ‘worker’. The recent FNV Kunsten decision used the notion of ‘false self-employed’ to go beyond the national concept of ‘employee’, but the wide interpretation of ‘worker’ shall be based on the need and necessity of employment protection deriving from economic dependency. As an alternative, the Gebhard formula may be invoked to grant the right to collective bargaining for platform workers.

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International courts have become a crucial element of protecting employee rights in recent decades. The ‘unorthodox’ 1 measures of the Hungarian Orbán government have provided a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of international courts, since these national measures have been defying various legal principles in general, but in particular in the field of employment, since acquiring a two-thirds parliamentary majority in 2010. The article analyses the most important of these employment laws, their objectives, problematic legal nature and the responses of the Hungarian Constitutional Court (hereinafter CC), the Court of Justice of the European Union (hereinafter CJEU), and the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter ECtHR). 2 Are these national and international courts able to ensure effective protection against such policies when they adversely affect workers’ fundamental rights, and if so, on what legal basis? Conclusions regarding unorthodox employment laws, such as termination without cause, the compulsory retirement of judges, a retroactive 98% tax on severance pay, and/or the nationalisation of private pension funds, might be useful to other countries with similar legislative tendencies. The article focuses on the question of whether international courts are able to block and efficiently remedy such national measures and tendencies in employment law.

As a result of a general revision, a new Labour Code entered into force on 1 July 2012 in Hungary. One of the determining objectives of the recent labour law reform was ‘flexibilisation’, and ensuring that regulation by labour law should be kept to a minimum. The new rules increased the contractual freedom of parties, and particularly the role of collective agreements in the regulation of employment relationships. While maintaining the basic structure of Hungarian labour law, the new Labour Code introduced conceptual changes in several key areas, such as the termination of employment relationships, liability for damages and collective rights. These changes were justified by the government on the grounds that the current labour law regulation was too rigid and that did not reflect the private law foundations of this field of law sufficiently. The article puts this statement under critical review and gives an overview of the most important elements of the labour law reform. In particular, after a short introduction we will examine what changes the new Labour Code introduced in the hierarchy of legal sources, and what attempts were made to extend the scope of the Labour Code to other forms of employment. Further, we will analyse to what extent the changes introduced by the new Labour Code modified the balance between the interests of employees and employers. Finally, we will also give an overview of the relationship between the new Labour Code and EU labour law.

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