ABSTRACT
‘Thriving on diversity’ was the title of a document, published in 1993 by the Multinational Business Forum, an organisation especially created by employers to counter the proposed European Works Council (EWC) Directive (Stoop 1994). Employers argued that the EWC would be a bureaucratically imposed uniform model, which pays no attention to the diverse and often de-centralised nature of business and industry (see Chapter 2 by Paul Knutsen for a detailed discussion). However, this argument was already obsolete, as the European Commission had incorporated voluntarism into the Directive and open negotiations as the basis for establishing EWCs. Thus, EWCs could be established in any form and at any level that employers and employee representatives could agree.
