Demanding Democracy in the Workplace: The European Trade Union Confederation and the Struggle to Regulate Multinationals

Abstract

On Wednesday, 17 December 1980, at 1.30 in the afternoon, the trade union representatives at the Citroën assembly plant in Forest near Brussels were summoned to an emergency meeting of the Conseil d’entreprise, the Works Council. At this meeting, the management announced the immediate closure of the plant, which was part of the French multinational group Peugeot-Citroën. According to a representative of the Christian Trade Union Confederation, ‘this news was a catastrophe for the plant workers who were faced with a brutal decision taken abroad [in Paris]’.1 The closure of the Forest plant with its 905 workers and more than one million cars produced since 19262 came unexpectedly for both the workers and the local management. A Belgian collective agreement of March 1972 had in fact established workers’ information and consultation rights in advance of decisions such as over the closure of a plant.3 However, as a survey compiled by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) pointed out, ‘this collective agreement is applicable only nationally and to local management and the latter did not take the decision but merely carried it out … The local management in Belgium … simply did not have the necessary authority to conduct independent negotiations with the employees’ representatives.’4 The ETUC report concluded: ‘The closure of the Citroën plant in Forest very clearly proves the need for a binding directive to regulate the information and consultation rights of workers beyond national frontiers.’5