This policy brief considers the lack of European Works Councils through a Belgian perspective. It discusses Belgian companies who are currently engaged in establishing one or have developed ‘functionally equivalent’ structures. The remaining companies are confronted with serious obstacles to... Find out more

The proposed EU company law package, which was published in April 2018 by the European Commission, seeks to encourage cross-border company mobility while at the same time protecting stakeholder interests. The ETUI’s GOODCORP network of company law experts has identified three areas where the package... Find out more

This policy brief discusses how social media can help renew trade union collective action and strengthen the labour movement’s capacity to mobilise. It demonstrates how social media can strengthen campaigning activities by examining two recent union-led campaigns in the United States: ‘OUR Walmart’... Find out more

The 2017 revised Shareholder Rights Directive gives shareholders a say on executive pay and requires institutional investors to improve shareholder engagement. The directive is thus designed to provide a counterweight to the increasingly dominant ‘shareholder’ model of corporate governance which has... Find out more

This policy brief examines the effectiveness of policies which aim to dismiss labour market institutions, in the name of competitiveness, across the European Union (EU). It also assesses the evidence which supports a positive relationship between deregulation and decentralization and productivity... Find out more

This policy brief takes as its starting point the fact that as soon as a company engages in European-level transnational restructuring, transnational information and consultation is needed to enable the social partners to consider the cross-border dynamic of the planned measures.This policy brief... Find out more

This policy brief examines if and how the reformulated obligation in the Recast European Works Council Directive to report back found its way into EWC agreements by looking at survey data, results of large-scale agreement analysis and by providing examples of clauses in which this obligation is... Find out more

Workers’ right to be represented on the board (of directors, or supervisory board) of their company is so widespread in Europe that it is deemed a core element of the European social model. Yet, very little is known about how those participation rights operate in practice.This Policy Brief outlines... Find out more

Flexibility within multinational companies (MNCs) has become increasingly transnational in character. Strategies of inter-firm benchmarking, outsourcing and cross-national or internal ‘coercive comparison’ are increasingly used by MNCs to enhance local performance by placing plants in competition... Find out more

This policy brief shows the importance of proper implementation of sanctions for the overall efficiency and implementation of the goals of the EWC Recast Directive. It formulates some concrete policy recommendations for the Commission’s future implementation report on this Directive. Find out more