The European Court of Justice and the Fixed-Term Work Directive: Still Fixed, but at Least Equal

From a social investment perspective, workers should have security, equality and the potential to develop skills and life-long learning on the workplace. This is important to consider against the backdrop of an increasing number of individuals in atypical work throughout Europe. The EU directives on fixed-term work are coherent with social investment in insisting on equal treatment of workers on fixed-term work with workers on comparable permanent contracts and in intending to avoid abuse of this contract form to the detriment of workers. In this paper, we first analyse the ECJ’s decisions concerning the fixed-term work directive, to analyse whether there is an expansive or restrictive interpretation of the provisions of the fixed-term work directive. Secondly, we analyse the multi-level integration of ECJ case-law in a principal case: the Mangold case in Germany. For our European level and our multi-level analysis, our findings, firstly, clearly shows that the fixed-term work directive is used as an entry point to address the (equal) treatment of workers, and that it is anti-discrimination principles that provide the legal basis for judgements. Secondly, our findings suggest that while the directive does have clauses to prevent unreasonable renewals, there are many (valid?) exceptions, such as fixed-term work for social policy purposes, which means that the ECJ’s jurisdiction in this area is rather weak. Thus, the Court’s responses are in line with social investment concerning equality of treatment, but less so with regard to abuse of the contractual form of fixed-term work.