Varieties of Articulation: Interest Representation in Multinational Companies at National and Local Level

Abstract

How articulation operates between employee representatives located at national and local level in multinational companies represents an under-researched topic. Analysing these forms of articulation in multinational companies (MNCs) from an internationally comparative perspective is likely to be especially fruitful in terms of advancing research in this area, as this offers the prospect of understanding how employee representatives at different locations within a single undertaking engage with and interpret problems, define their interests, and seek to aggregate these at the various levels. The countries in which our case-study companies have operations exhibited a wide range of national and local interest arrangements for employee representation. These arrangements were strongly marked by the industrial relations institutions that prevail nationally. The transnational level of interest representation was found to represent a source of power for employee representatives within national structures. One significant structural limit on this, however, is when a local plant or other operation is not directly represented on a European Works Council (EWC) or when there is no effective national level of action and regulation. In these instances, the chain of articulation will be broken and no resources can be transferred to these operations.