ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the literature on global and European production networks and the qualitative new form of social competition. European Works Councils (EWC) are neither able to stop or regulate cross-border site-competition, nor are they in other ways an effective means to represent the social and democratic dimension in the process of economic Europeanization. The chapter discusses a more detailed view of labour in contemporary Europeanization, taking Critical European Political Economy and, again, the sociology of work and industry to demonstrate the structurally limited character of EWCs’ role for a necessary social Europeanization. Contemporary site-competition must be seen in the light of quasi-generalized competitive social fragmentation via multidimensional divisionalization of work and production. Economic and social competition among the workforces of different European production sites goes far beyond the “old” question of competitive pressure via disinformation even when this sometimes exists.
