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5 Eur. L. Open 1 (2026)

handle is hein.journals/eurlwop5 and id is 1 raw text is: European Law Open (2026), 5, 1-8 doi:10.1017/elo.2026.10079 ; t : 1i Vladimir Bogoeski Centre for Transformative Private Law (ACT), University of Amsterdam Faculty of Law, Netherlands Email: v.bogoeski@uva.nl. (Received 18 February 2026; revised 18 February 2026; accepted 18 February 2026) On 11 November 2025 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a long-awaited judgment concerning the recently adopted Adequate Minimum Wages Directive (AMWD).1 By upholding the Directive against the Danish Government's annulment action, the Court has averted another Laval moment; yet, as the initial relief settles, the judgment calls for reflection on its broader implications for social justice in the European Union and whether we can read it as a countermovement to the ongoing 'displacement' of Social Europe.2 The AMWD was adopted on 19 October 2022 after a cumbersome negotiation process and was recognised as a victory for workers' rights and Social Europe.? The Proposal for the Directive had come after over a decade of Eurozone austerity politics affecting wages and collective bargaining particularly in Member States in the southern periphery.4 Conditionality-driven austerity governance had included public sector wage cuts, pension reforms, labour market flexibilisation and restrictions on collective bargaining, all of which weakened workers' rights and eroded social protections across the affected Member States.' This is partly what Kilpatrick understood as a displacement of 'Social Europe for Workers' that had been established in the 1970s and developed in the following decades.6 Moreover, the Directive came as a response to ever growing precariousness among working populations and growing in-work poverty across sectors,7 further exacerbated by an ongoing cost-of-living crisis in Europe and globally.8 In this context, a targeted directive seeking to establish a shared understanding of adequate minimum wages and thus bring 'Case C-19/23 Denmark v Parliament and Council ECLI:EU:C:2025:865. 20n the concept of'displacement of Social Europe' see C Kilpatrick, 'The Displacement of Social Europe: A Productive Lens of Inquiry' 14 (2018) European Constitutional Law Review 62. 3L Ratti, E Brameshuber and V Pietrogiovanni (eds), The EU Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages: Context, Commentary and Trajectories (Bloomsbury Academic 2024). 4R Dukes, 'Conflict and the Crisis in Labour Law: From Weimar to Austerity' in PF Kjaer and N Olsen (eds), Critical Theories of Crisis in Europe: From Weimar to the Euro (Rowman & Littlefield International 2016) 107-24; M Keune, 'The Effects of the EU's Assault on Collective Bargaining: Less Governance Capacity and More Inequality' 21 (2015) Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research 477. 'See G Kennedy, 'Embedding Neoliberalism in Greece: The Transformation of Collective Bargaining and Labour Market Policy in Greece during the Eurozone Crisis' 97 (2016) Studies in Political Economy 253. 6Kilpatrick (n 2) 62-4. 7L Ratti and P Schoukens (eds), Working Yet Poor: Challenges to EU Social Citizenship (Bloomsbury Publishing 2023). 8European Committee of Social Rights, A review of States Parties' ad hoc reports: Social rights and the cost-of-living crisis (2025), available at https://rm.coe.int/prems-003925-gbr-2005-cost-of-living-crisis-web-a4-rev/1680b5209f. © The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.