In an interesting new piece a couple of weeks back on the EU Law Analysis blog, Virginia Passalacqua writes about the case of O.D. and others, C-350/20 referred last year to the European Court of Justice.

On the face of it, it’s a fairly anodyne case about whether Italy can refuse certain maternity benefits to legal residents who are neither EU nationals nor non-EU nationals with official long-term residence status, but instead are covered by the Single Permit Directive for shorter-term resid.

Virginia seems to see it as open and shut on the basis of precedents in the cases of…

The UK Supreme Court has now delivered its final verdict on the question of whether Uber Drivers are workers for the purpose of various bits of UK employment law. The full and admirably clear judgement handed down on 19 February 2021 can be found here. The conclusion, contrary to Uber’s arguments, is that in reality and despite what the contracts might say, Riders get Uber to provide them with a ride and Uber engages Drivers in order that Uber may provide the ride. …

The Conservatives have put out a scary story about continued free movement under a Labour government…

New analysis has revealed that Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to continue free movement with EU countries would cost DWP over £4 billion in extra benefit costs over the next 10 years, dramatically increasing the size of the nation’s benefits bill.

I have to say that this really is a shoddy piece of work muddling up all sorts of different things together. Here’s their basic calculation…

I always click the links, so let’s look at what they point to. The first Migration Observatory one goes to…

Back in April I blogged about how the number of EU workers in the UK had changed between the referendum and the end of 2018 and concluded that while higher-skilled jobs in the UK continued to be attractive to people from around the EU, lower-skilled ones had become less so. This seemed to be particularly true for people from Poland, as their economy at home strengthened.

This is an updated rehash with a further two quarters data to take us up to Apr-Jun 2019. There won’t be any more data at this level of detail published by ONS this side…

HMRC released a new publication today about taxes paid and benefits received by EEA nationals. This covers the tax year 2016/17 and is the fourth annual instalment so we can look at continuing trends

Observations by me on the publication for 2013/14 can be found here, here and here, for 2014/15 here and 2015/16 here. Like last time, I’m dividing first three ways into Eastern Europe (the 2004 accession countries and Romania and Bulgaria), Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) and Northern Europe (everyone else in the EU14).

All previous cautions apply, in particular that we are only looking…

Regular readers will know about the Elephant Trap on which I’ve blogged on several occasions. You fall into the trap when you use the term ‘new jobs’ to describe net growth in employment. Things like ‘Most new jobs are in the public sector’ or ‘Half of new jobs are taken by migrants’. …

There’s been plenty of anecdote about a Brexodus of EU nationals from the UK, what with all the uncertainty and hostility generated by the referendum and subsequent developments. And business responses to the government White Paper on a new immigration system seem universally alarmed at the prospect of proposals that might choke off flows into lower skilled (and/or lower-paid) jobs. So here are a few data-based observations of labour market changes over the past two years, largely from the Office of National Statistics Labour Force Survey.

Observations are made more difficult now by the public datasets having less detailed information…

The question of whether Uber’s Riders enter into a contract with Uber or with individual Drivers was decided by the Court of Appeal last December in deciding what employment rights the Drivers had.

The fairly scathing lead judgement, which found that the Drivers were actually working for Uber, said

For [Uber] to be stating to its statutory regulator that it is operating a private hire vehicle service in London and is a fit and proper person to do so, while at the same time arguing in this litigation that it is merely an affiliate of a Dutch-registered company which licenses…