CROSS-BORDER SOCIAL DIALOGUE AND AGREEMENTS: An ...

Cross-border social dialogue and agreements
perspective, a key element of IFAs is the requirement that lead firms
influence their subcontractors and suppliers. However, this coverage is at
times qualified by the particular set-up of the MNC’s representation
arrangements. The Volkswagen-IMF agreement, for instance, specifies
coverage “for the countries and regions represented in the Group Global
Works Council” (Volkswagen and IMF, 2002, p. 1).
IFAs constitute an important advance in establishing a terrain for
international industrial relations, particularly with regard to earlier corporate
codes of conduct. They define a set of key actors on the trade
union side as legitimate partners for international social dialogue, most
importantly the global union federations, but also European industry
federations, EWCs and national trade unions. This poses important challenges
for the power balance and division of labour in the international
labour movement, most notably the representation of workers and
unions of the “global South”, but also the legitimacy of (European) works
councils as opposed to trade unions (Hammer, 2005, pp. 522-527).
Although the institutional platform and resources of an EWC can be very
important in negotiating as well as implementing and monitoring IFAs,
there are issues of representation that have not been resolved. This problem
is probably exacerbated by the overwhelming concentration of IFAs
concluded with MNCs headquartered in Europe. Implications of these
problems for a European legal framework for transnational collective bargaining
are currently discussed at European Union level (see for example
Ales et al., 2006).
Four levels of provisions
The key substantive provisions of IFAs are anchored in the fundamental
labour rights as defined in the eight core Conventions of the
ILO’s 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.
Beyond this, however, four levels of provisions can be distinguished,
which establish minimum labour and human rights standards, delimit
the employment relation, deal with softer negotiating issues at company
level (such as health and safety, training and restructuring), and finally
other issues that are based on private standards (see table 2 in the appendix
for an overview).
On the first level, while the majority of agreements proclaim to
respect “internationally recognized human rights” in general, a good
number of agreements explicitly refer to other multilateral texts (see
table 3 in the appendix). Of the 62 IFAs reviewed here, 17 state that they
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