Wat zou worden ingediend

Het voorstel, in het format van de Commissie

Over de registratie wordt beslist op basis van deze tekst, niet van de ontwerpverordening. De Commissie beoordeelt de doelstellingen; het ontwerp reist mee ter illustratie en kan laag voor laag worden ingekort zonder de doelstellingen te raken.

Deze pagina is nog niet beschikbaar in het Nederlands; hieronder volgt het Engelse origineel.

Op deze pagina
  1. 1. Title
  2. 2. Objectives
  3. 3. Provisions of the Treaties considered relevant
  4. 4. Annex on the subject, objectives and background
  5. 5. Draft legal act

The text that would go into the Commission's registration form, in the fields and within the limits set by Annex II to Regulation (EU) 2019/788. Status: DRAFT, not filed. Filing is a Gate 2 action. This exists because every Gate 1 conversation will ask what the ask actually says, and the draft Regulation is not that: under Article 6(3)(c) the registration test is applied to this text.

Two things govern the drafting. First, Article 6(4) allows partial registration only where part of the initiative "including its main objectives" survives, so the main objectives here are Layer 0 of regulation/memorandum/severability.md, an assessment and a proposal, and the draft Regulation sits in the accompanying-draft slot where trimming can reach it without touching the ask. Second, Annex II counts the objectives and the annex in characters without spaces.

1. Title

Citizens' participation in the productivity gains of hyper-automated production

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2. Objectives

We ask the Commission to assess, and to propose instruments ensuring, the participation of citizens of the Union in the productivity gains of hyper-automated production, meaning production whose output is substantially decoupled from employment.

Automation is concentrating the returns of production in a few very large undertakings as the labour share falls. Member States have begun to respond separately, with divergent levies and participation schemes, which fragments the internal market.

We therefore ask the Commission:

  1. to assess, and to propose harmonised criteria and a procedure for, the designation of undertakings whose output is substantially decoupled from employment;

  2. to propose mechanisms by which the gains and value of such production become broadly owned by, or shared with, citizens of the Union;

  3. to report periodically on automation, employment and ownership concentration, so that any instrument adopted can be corrected or repealed on the evidence.

A complete draft Regulation accompanies this initiative as an illustration. The objectives, not the draft, are what we ask for.

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3. Provisions of the Treaties considered relevant

Article 114 TFEU (approximation of laws for the establishment and functioning of the internal market), as the primary contemplated basis for designation, transparency and the harmonised participation mechanism.

Article 352 TFEU, as the residual basis for any element the Commission considers to fall outside Article 114, in particular the creation of a Union body holding assets and the individual entitlement.

Article 3(3) TEU and Article 9 TFEU, as to the objectives of a highly competitive social market economy and of taking social requirements into account in the Union's policies.

No amendment of the Treaties is sought. Every element of the initiative rests on an existing basis, primarily Article 114 TFEU and residually Article 352 TFEU, and the accompanying draft is severable by layer so that any element found to fall outside those bases can be trimmed without touching the objectives.

4. Annex on the subject, objectives and background

Subject matter. The initiative concerns the distribution of the capital value produced by highly automated undertakings. Its premise is empirical, not ideological: where output is substantially decoupled from employment, the historic channel through which citizens shared in productivity, namely wages, no longer carries the gains. The initiative asks the Commission to open a second channel, ownership, and to do so on harmonised Union rules rather than leaving it to twenty-seven divergent national answers.

The fragmentation is not hypothetical. Eight Member States operate digital services taxes at rates between 1,5 % and 7,5 % with thresholds that differ by orders of magnitude, several more have proposals before their parliaments, and the resulting patchwork applies different liabilities to the same cross-border service depending on where its users happen to be. The European Parliament rejected a robot tax in February 2017, the question has returned with the large-scale adoption of artificial intelligence, and no Union instrument occupies the field.

The mechanism we illustrate. Undertakings above objective thresholds would be designated on the model of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925. Each designated undertaking would issue, once, a non-voting citizens' capital warrant entitling a common reserve to subscribe at nominal value for 3 % of its fully diluted capital, crystallising on the undertaking's first liquidity event, or earlier where it distributes value to its own shareholders above a stated share of its turnover, or in any event seven years after issuance. The reserve would hold the resulting shares passively and without votes, insulated in both directions from Union and national budgets. Citizens of the Union would hold equal, personal and non-transferable entitlements to distributions as and when they are realised, carrying no right of individual cash redemption or sale, administered through national vehicles.

Deliberately, nothing is payable in cash, nothing enters any public budget, and no undertaking is required to sell anything. The instrument attaches to a moment of realised value that the undertaking itself chooses. That structure is what makes it a measure of company law and market regulation rather than a fiscal measure.

Honesty about the difficulty. We do not claim the legal basis is uncontested. The characterisation of the participation mechanism under Article 114 is arguable and we have published the argument against it at full strength, together with the case law relied on by both sides, in a public memorandum of objections. Our position is that a characterisation dispute of this kind belongs to the legislative stage, as it did for the initiative on wealth taxation registered in 2023, and not to the registration stage, where the test is whether the ask manifestly falls outside the Commission's powers.

Severability. The ask above is drafted so that it survives trimming. Its main objectives are an assessment and a proposal, which is what an initiative may ask for and which requires no particular legal basis. If the Commission concludes that parts of the accompanying draft exceed what it could propose, we would prefer partial registration under Article 6(4) of Regulation (EU) 2019/788 to refusal, with any trimming applying to the accompanying draft rather than to the objectives.

Evidence and correction. The draft carries a reporting obligation and a falsification condition: if designated undertakings do not in fact show the decoupling the criteria assume, the evidence is published and the instrument is to be corrected or repealed. The complete text, the objections to it, the evidence base and the record of every adversarial review it has been through are public at ownthemachine.eu.

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Annex II permits organisers to submit a draft legal act. The complete draft Regulation at regulation/ is submitted in that slot, with the memorandum of objections and the evidence base referenced but not submitted, since they are published.