ABSTRACT

The adoption of the Directive on the establishment of European Works Councils (EWCs) in multinational enterprises on 22 September 1994 can be viewed as the most significant innovation in European employment and so­ cial policy in recent years.1 The measure is intended to ensure that employees in companies and groups of companies with operations in a number of Mem­ ber States of the European Economic Area (EEA)2 have rights to information and consultation with their employer. The Directive, which embraces some 1,800 companies headquartered both within and outside the EU with a total o f some 15 million employees, has been transposed into national law in vir­ tually all Member States or become the object of a national-level collective agreement - albeit in some cases some time after the deadline date of 22 Sep­ tember 1996.3 After many years of debate and controversy for the first time in the history of the process of European integration the EWC Directive cre­ ated the political and legal foundations for employee involvement in multi­ national companies. The key steps towards the establishment of EWCs had already been taken in the 1980s with the voluntary establishment of a number o f ‘European Information Committees’ in large French multinational groups. The Directive allowed for a two-year period following its adoption during which employers and employee representatives could establish EWCs on a ‘voluntary’ basis, without the formal negotiating procedures set out in Arti­ cles 5/6 of the Directive, provided some minimum conditions were met on coverage of the agreement. By September 1996 around 460 voluntary agree­ ments had been concluded on the legal basis of Article 13 of the EWC Direc­ tive. Since then an estimated further 170 agreements have been negotiated under Article 6 of the Directive.