Looking closely at the RegioPost case: two new papers on public procurement and labour standards under eu law

I have been working on the implications of the RegioPost Judgment for a while (I can't believe it will soon be a year since the conference we held at the University of Bristol Law School), and finally uploaded two new papers on SSRN where I discuss different aspects of the case and its implications for the enforcement of labour standards through public procurement regulated by the 2014 EU Public Procurement Package.

The first paper is concerned with the regulatory substitution implicit in the inclusion of social and employment-related considerations in public procurement. The second paper is concerned with the competition and State aid implications of the asymmetrical rules on minimum wage requirements that result from RegioPost, Rüffert and Bundesdruckerei. Below are some additional details on each of the papers. I hope that both papers manage to provide complementary views on the many issues that derive from the interaction between EU public procurement law, EU labour law and EU free movement law. Feedback most welcome!

Regulatory Substitution between Labour & Public Procurement Law: EU's Shifting Approach to Enforcing Labour Standards in Public Contracts

In this paper, I reflect about a recent regulatory trend concerning the enforcement of labour standards through contract compliance clauses and other requirements of public contracts tendered under European Union public procurement law. On the back of recent developments in the case law of the European Court of Justice regarding cross-border situations of procurement-based enforcement of labour standards, notably in the re-examination of the Rüffert case in both the Bundesdruckerei and RegioPost cases, I reflect on this phenomenon from the perspective of regulatory substitution. In setting out a basic framework to assess regulatory substitution, I hypothesise that most of the difficulties evidenced by the case law stem from the transfer of labour regulation goals to the public procurement sphere. I then aim to test this hypothesis by means of an analysis of labour policy-oriented mechanisms included in the 2014 revision of the EU public procurement rules. I then go on to critically assess the fitness for purpose of the procurement mechanisms from the perspective of contributing to the enforcement of labour standards. And I ultimately extract some general conclusions that can be of relevance in non-EU jurisdictions where similar trends of regulatory substitution between labour and public procurement law may be emerging.

Sanchez-Graells, Albert, Regulatory Substitution between Labour and Public Procurement Law: The EU's Shifting Approach to Enforcing Labour Standards in Public Contracts (April 25, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2958297.

Competition and State Aid Implications of ‘Public’ Minimum Wage Clauses in EU Public Procurement after the Regiopost Judgment

This chapter assesses the use of public procurement to enforce labour standards from a competition and State aid perspective, and concentrates on the establishment of contract compliance clauses under the rules of Article 26 of Directive 2004/18/EC and Article 70 of Directive 2014/24/EU and in relation with the Posted Workers Directive. In particular, it assesses the case law of the European Court of Justice in Rüffert, Bundesdruckerei and RegioPost from an economic perspective. This highlights the potential negative competitive implications that derive from the asymmetrical rules the case law creates for the cross-border and the inter-regional provision of services to the public sector. It also underlines the risk of (regional) economic protectionism that they create. The chapter then assesses these issues from the perspective the EU public procurement, competition and State aid rules. It concludes that, given the current ineffectiveness of the checks and balances theoretically oriented towards the prevention of these undesirable effects, contracting authorities and policy makers would be well advised to abandon their efforts of setting partial, incomplete and difficult to monitor minimum/living wage requirements for public contracts only.

Sanchez-Graells, Albert, Competition and State Aid Implications of ‘Public’ Minimum Wage Clauses in EU Public Procurement after the Regiopost Judgment (April 25, 2017). Prepared for future publication in A Sanchez-Graells (ed), Smart Public Procurement and Labour Standards—Pushing the Discussion after RegioPost (Bloomsbury-Hart). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2958296.