Fundamental Rights and the Horizontal Enforcement of the EU Labour Legislation: The Potential and Limits of the Charter

The 2019-2024 EU legislature exhibited remarkable activism in labour law, adopting directives under the European Pillar of Social Rights. These pieces of secondary law may be framed as “fundamental rights legislation”, as they ultimately give concrete expression to a number of rights secured by the Charter. However, such individual guarantees for the labour sector are necessarily designed to apply in horizontal relationships. Against the absence of horizontal direct effect upon directives’ provisions, this article assesses the extent to which the combined invocation of Charter rights may provide a leeway for the enforcement of these directives in disputes between private parties. To that end, the article first conceptualises the linkage between the provisions of those pieces of secondary law and the Charter provisions on substantive fundamental rights that they purport to implement, with a view to assessing whether it meets the conditions for combined enforcement in horizontal disputes. Second, the analysis delves into the conditions that those Charter provisions must fulfil to be directly invoked in disputes between individuals. Since some fundamental rights to which the provisions of EU directives on labour conditions give concrete expression lack the unconditional nature to have direct effect, the article finally considers whether the right to a fair trial pursuant to Article 47 of the Charter offers additional pathways for direct enforcement.