The European company statute: employee involvement—and beyond

Abstract

Employee representation in managerial decision-making in its broader sense has to distinguish between two basic forms. At the ’lower’ (or plant) level different forms exist across the European Union (ETUC 1998, EIRR 2001 a and b for details). Mostly we find works councils or workplace committees, in some cases also union delegates and/or shop stewards. At the ’upper’ (or company) level, Member States provisions on employees’ board-level involvement also differ to a considerable or even wider degree: There are so-called monistic as well as dualistic systems of corporate governance or, in another terminology, single-tier versus dual-tier systems of management structure and employee involvement on the board. In the latter variant, activities and performance of the management board are monitored and controlled by an additional organ, the supervisory board (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, Portugal). This basic distinction is missing within the first form, the socalled board (or board of directors) system (Ireland, Luxembourg, Spain, Sweden, also Italy and the UK). Some countries (such as Finland and France) are characterised by a combination of both systems (Timmesfeld, 1994; Group of Experts, 1997; Schulten et al., 1998 for details). All in all, differences in existing national regulations at the ’upper’ level are even greater than at the ’lower’ level as far as scope, management and supervisory structure, coverage, degree and intensity of employee involvement are concerned—not to mention the enormous variety of national ’customs and practices’ that have developed over time and are definitely going to persist (Carley, 1998). At the supranational level, this great diversity of ’joint regulation’ is of particular interest. The Directive ’On the establishment of a European Works Council or a procedure in Community-scale undertakings and Community-scale groups of undertakings for the purposes of informing and consulting employees’ (94/95 EG) (hereafter