"How weakening due diligence EU rules became a ‘betrayal’ for workers", 29 October 2025

The proposed rollback of the EU’s corporate accountability rules will significantly weaken their ability to address labour violations within the EU, experts and labour union representatives have told EUobserver... Workers’ representatives said that impacts on workers in the EU’s garment, agricultural, transport, and industrial sectors will be especially significant... They argued that the rollback could mean a failure to address abuses including excessive working hours, forced labour, dangerous working conditions, and poverty wages...  

One expected change in the European Parliament’s compromise text for the omnibus is its reintroduction of a ‘risk-based’ approach to due diligence in the CSDDD.  

Johannes Blankenbach from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), a global NGO, said that “this asks companies to really look in their full supply chains on where the most severe and most likely human rights or environmental risks are and then first take action there.”

[...]

Paul Roeland, a campaigner at Amsterdam-based NGO Clean Clothes Campaign, told EUobserver that the European Parliament’s proposed minimal employee threshold (5,000 employees) for the CSDDD would exclude some of the largest EU clothing brands. “Most of the concrete violations we have been working on in the past years would fall outside the scope,” Roeland said. “This includes many of the recent violations inside the EU as well, such as various scandals in the Italian luxury sector and production in south-eastern Europe”. 

The proposed rollbacks in the EP’s compromise include removing an EU-wide civil liability regime in the CSDDD, which would have created a common standard for due diligence violations and held violators to account in EU courts. Professor Rasche said that instead of a single harmonised regime, this would result in 27 different regimes and increase complexity...