We are dismantling decades of regulation for an estimated economic gain of 0.07% of EU GDP. That is the Commission’s own figure, as Tordoir, Guttenberg and Redeker showed in Politico last week. If the economic justification is that thin, the real drivers must be looked for elsewhere.
And the wave keeps expanding. After weakening environmental standards, digital rights, and food and chemical safety, workers’ rights are next in line.
BusinessEurope published a paper this week calling for a “labour market omnibus.” The script is familiar: label workers’ rights as “administrative burdens,” dress up rollbacks as “simplification,” and bundle everything into an omnibus that bypasses impact assessments and public consultation.
Before examining what they are asking for, it is worth pausing on what the omnibus method has already delivered — because the pattern is now well established.
How the omnibus machine works
The first major strike came with Omnibus I, unveiled in February 2025: a sweeping package that bundled the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, the EU Taxonomy, and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism into a single proposal. Thousands of companies were exempted from sustainability reporting obligations overnight. Due diligence duties were narrowed. Enforcement timelines were pushed back by years. All of it dressed as administrative relief for SMEs.
Then came the digital omnibus, weakening data protection rules and carving out exceptions for AI systems, handed, in practice, as a gift to the large non-European platforms that the EU had spent years trying to regulate.
Then food and chemical safety: the REACH regulation, deforestation rules, pesticide frameworks - each carved up in turn.
Ten omnibus packages in 2025 alone. At least three more have already announced for 2026. And the Commission has pledged - under EUCO’s demand - to ‘stress test’ all existing EU legislation against industrial competitiveness, a process that, if pursued with the same logic, would trigger the largest deregulation wave in the history of the EU.
The method is consistent across every wave. Compliance costs are foregrounded; benefits are ignored. Urgency is invoked to sideline or at least counter parliamentary scrutiny. Public consultations are skipped as they are impact assessment. Civil society, trade unions, and the citizens the rules were designed to protect are systematically excluded from the process - the very definition of maladministration, as the European Ombudsman has now formally found, and the Commission unconvincingly responded today.
Social Europe is next
BusinessEurope’s paper targets five pieces of legislation: the Pay Transparency Directive, the Platform Work Directive, the Transparent and Predictable Working Conditions Directive, the Working Time Directive, and the interface between REACH and occupational safety rules. And it explicitly calls on the Commission to deliver “a labour market omnibus.”
Two illustrations are enough to reveal the logic.
The Pay Transparency Directive — hard-won legislation to close the gender pay gap — is not yet in force. Its transposition deadline is June 2026. BusinessEurope wants to freeze it now and raise the reporting threshold from 100 to 1,000 workers. That one amendment alone would exempt the overwhelming majority of European companies before a single worker has ever used the law.
On working time, BusinessEurope wants to scrap the obligation to record working hours — an obligation that exists precisely because the Court of Justice of the EU found, in its landmark CCOO judgment, that without systematic recording, workers cannot enforce their own rights in practice. No records, no rights. Reversing a CJEU judgment not through litigation but through a directive amendment, quietly bundled into an omnibus.
The evidence gap nobody wants to discuss
As I have been teaching for two decades, you can model compliance costs before a law applies, but you cannot really measure benefits that have never been allowed to materialise: equal pay enforced, hours recorded, gig workers protected. Ignoring the benefit side is not a technical exercise. It is a political choice.
And this is the deeper pattern connecting every omnibus wave. Rules are not being targeted because their effects have been weighed. The window between adoption and application is when lobbies strike — before beneficiaries have organised, before evidence of impact exists, before repeal becomes politically costly.
BusinessEurope’s paper, to its credit, is unusually transparent about this. It does not pretend these directives have failed. It simply wants them gone — or neutered — before anyone can find out whether they work.
Who is responsible?
The Commission launched the omnibus strategy and owns it politically. The EPP has provided the parliamentary cover, having abandoned the centrist coalitions that governed the EU for a generation in favour of alliances with the far right that have made this deregulatory majority possible.
But responsibility does not end there. The centre-left — Socialists, Greens, the broader progressive bloc — will need to decide whether it negotiates at the margins of each omnibus or draws a clear structural line: no bundling of social legislation, no shortcuts on impact assessments, no rolling back of rules that workers have never once had the chance to use.
Social Europe took decades to build. It is being dismantled, directive by directive, repackaged each time as bureaucratic relief.
The labour market omnibus is coming. Built on costs that are counted and benefits that are erased.
Excellent piece. And an important one.
I have been involved in negotiating JHA files since 2006. In nearly two decades of working on these dossiers, I have seen many crazy ideas. But I cannot recall a moment when the trajectory felt quite as disorienting as it does now.
What concerns me is not simply that we are responding to external pressure but the very nature of the response. Because we are “trumping” our own achievements and gradually dismantling standards that took half a century of negotiation, compromise, and political courage to build, in exchange for a notion of competitiveness that, on closer inspection, has remarkably little to do with competing and a great deal to do with capitulating.
Competitiveness built on the erosion of rights is not a European model. It is someone else’s . Europe’s comparative advantage has never been that it could produce more cheaply or regulate less. If we stop relying on the rule of law, and human dignity, we become imitators of systems whose internal logic we have spent decades defining ourselves against.
And there is a deeper irony here. A Union that responds to the pressures of illiberal governance by adopting its methods does not defend the “European way of life” - the buzzword we often hear in important speeches. It abandons it. And, in doing so, cedes the one form of global leadership that was genuinely ours to offer...
That would be a very different European project from the one many of us have spent our careers working for. And a far less worthy one.