Introduction:
I started to put some thoughts together, from a management perspective, on how the 2009 European Works Councils Directive has played out, ten years after it became national law in June 2011. As I began to do so I realised that any such thoughts needed some context.
- Why was the original 1996 Directive revised – “recast” in the jargon, in 2008/9?
- Where did the original 1996 Directive come from in the first place? What problems was it designed to solve?
I have been involved with, and have been writing about, EWCs since the early 1990s, as the original Directive was making its way through the Brussels legislative process. I have been there from the beginning.
Over the years I have advised on the negotiation and renegotiation of multiple EWC agreements. I have also worked with managements which have EWCs operating under the Subsidiary Requirements.
Because of that 30 years of experience I know where things came from and why they are the way they are, as do many managers of my generation, the first to have had to deal with EWCs.
But a great many of those managers are now gone, happy in retirement, taking their first-hand knowledge with them.
So, as I began to write about the 2009 Directive I thought I might as well try and also get down on paper some background and history which could be useful for those managers now charged with managing EWCs in their businesses.
As a result, this paper comes in two parts which can be read separately from each other.
Part 1 are my thoughts on how the 2009 Directive has worked out in practice and where we stand today. Part 1 is by no means a comprehensive guide to the 2009 Directive. Alan Wild and myself wrote such a guide back in 2009/11 which badly needs to be updated. Maybe something for later this year.
Part 2 offers some historical context by looking at the long debate in the EU, stretching back to the 1970s about employee involvement, including the controversies around the 5th company law Directive and the “Vredeling” Directive, ending with the enactment in 1994 of the EWC Directive.
For those interested in deep-diving into all things EWC, we have our training program Managing European Employee Relations in (Very) Challenging Times running in Sitges, Barcelona in late October 2021, covering that topic and a range of other challenges facing HRM today.
Covid has changed the world of work forever. Remote working and virtual meetings will be baked into how we work from here on. EWCs cannot escape this change. But because we will work in a different way in the future from how we did in the past does not change the fundamentals of what needs to be done.
Pay attention to your EWC and always be guided by how best to “do the right thing”.
