ABSTRACT
Reflecting a more widespread development in European Union (EU) social policy, towards regulation through agreement ‘under the shadow of the law’ (Bercusson 1992) between the social partners, the EU’s 1994 Directive on European Works Councils (EWCs) gives preference to arrangements negotiated between management and employee representatives over the statutory model specified in the Directive itself. At the time of the Directive’s adoption, the scope for the negotiation of bespoke, enterprise-specific European-level information and consultation arrangements was seen to offer management and employee negotiators a considerable degree of flexibility (Gold and Hall 1994: 183). To date, agreements establishing over 700 EWCs in multinational companies (MNCs) within the European Economic Area (EEA) have been concluded, representing an unprecedented incidence of European-level negotiating activity. In practice, reports on the provisions of these agreements have pointed to the emergence of some marked similarities, as well as differences, between the results of these negotiations (Bonneton et al. 1996; Marginson et al. 1998; Carley and Marginson 2000). This chapter presents a systematic analysis of the factors influencing the nature of the ‘constrained choices’ being made by management and employee representatives in concluding agreements establishing EWCs. Four propositions are investigated:
a ‘statutory model effect’, whereby scope for negotiation notwithstanding, agreements tend to conform with the provisions of the Directive’s statutory model;
a ‘learning effect’, under which innovatory features of earlier agreements are diffused to later agreements;
a ‘country effect’, whereby, in their main features, EWCs resemble the national arrangements for employee information and consultation of the country in which an MNC is headquartered and;
a ‘sector effect’, whereby in important respects EWCs within a given sector resemble each other, possibly through the impact of the respective European Industry Federations of trade unions.
