Abstract
This article examines the 2024 EU traineeships package against the broader problem of the legal status of traineeships in European labour law. It argues that the package is significant not only because it seeks to improve the protection of trainees, but because it brings to the surface a more fundamental issue that many national systems have long left underdefined: whether, and under which conditions, a traineeship can remain legally distinct from employment while taking place within a productive organisation and involving activities of clear economic value. The article first reconstructs the fragmented legal status of traineeships in EU law and in the Member States, showing how traineeships occupy a structurally unstable position between work and training. It then analyses the Commission proposal of 20 March 2024, with particular attention to its legal basis under Article 153 TFEU, its scope, and its attempt to combine an equal-treatment logic for trainees who are already workers with an enforcement strategy against fictitious traineeships. The article next examines the subsequent positions of the Council and the Parliament, showing that the legislative process has made explicit a deeper tension already present in the original package: the Council seeks to clarify that the directive targets fictitious traineeships and employment-related protections, while the Parliament seeks to extend the directive toward the positive regulation of traineeship quality as such. The article concludes that the main difficulty of the reform lies in the mismatch between the Union’s competence to regulate working conditions and the hybrid legal nature of many traineeships. At the same time, it warns against an uncritical labourisation of traineeships, which may strengthen rather than reduce their use as cheap and weakly protected labour.