The European Works Councils: between corporate social responsibility and labour participation

This project aims to analyse the possibilities of increasing workers participation within multinational companies (MNCs). In concrete, the project focus on the European Works Councils (EWCs), created by Directive 94/45/EC, on September 22, 1994. This Community law created effective conditions for both the establishment of EWCs and the creation of mechanisms for information and consultation of employees in Community-scale companies or groups of companies, i.e., companies with at least 1.000 employees within the European Economic Area where at least two different Member States employ a minimum of 150 employees in each of them. This project sets out from a double observation concerning the Portuguese industrial relations system, which has been shared by several researchers. Firstly, it is a system that presents dual characteristics, since it is composed, on one hand, by a small amount of large companies where the negotiation between employers and workers present a more or less institutionalized character; and, on the other hand, by a large amount of small and medium companies where the industrial relations are regulated by informal methods and where the institutionalization of the relations between capital and labour presents itself with lack of relevancy. However, secondly, the main Portuguese trade union organizations (the CGTP or Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses ­ the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers - and the UGT or União Geral de Trabalhadores) have denounced that, besides its dimension, it’s mainly in companies in general that the workers participation is minor, specially when compared to the European reality of the more advanced countries of the EU. In general, it is denounced the frequent deficit of democracy in the workplace, where workers’ rights and trade union practices are arbitrarily restricted or repressed by management. In this manner, by analyzing the labour participation spaces in the framework of the MNCs (through the EWCs), the challenge of testing the effectiveness of the relationship between capital and labour in MNCs is posed upon this project. In spite of the Directive on the EWCs completing 10 years, its implementation in Portugal is still in its first steps. Thus the need to seek the manner by which the referred Directive is being received by the employers and by the workers and being an object of common share amongst them, precisely because the directive itself has by goal (as referred to above) the information and the consultation of workers in the MNCs.