Bargaining over Workers’ Data Rights: How Unions and Works Councils Can Use Collective Bargaining to Specify Workplace Data Protection Norms

Abstract

This paper follows from an expert workshop on workplace data protection held at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Competence Centre on the Future of Work in Brussels in October 2023. At the workshop it became clear that in order to boost workplace data protection compliance, the norms of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will need to be specified for the workplace context.

This paper focuses on Art. 88 GDPR, which allows Member States to ‘provide for more specific rules’ on the processing of employees’ personal data in the employment context, in the form of national laws or collective agreements, including ‘works agreements’ (i.e. firm-level agreements). It identifies where the GDPR requires specification for the workplace and indicates how unions and works councils might go about that. Although the paper can serve as inspiration for the content of national workplace data protection laws, it is written for unions and works councils that negotiate agreements on data protection issues.