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

Cross-border social dialogue and agreements
Monitoring stretches from integration of the agreement into the
internal corporate audit (Leoni and Daimler, for example) to being
included in the work of a separate compliance organization (IKEA).
MNCs at the end of buyer-driven commodity chains (Gereffi, 1999) find
advantages in making the framework agreement part of the contractual
obligations of suppliers and subcontractors, together with a host of other
obligations. Indeed, a cluster of MNCs imposes concrete obligations on
their suppliers and, to some extent, has established a complicated governance
structure for monitoring social and labour rights.
Particularly with regard to the transnational dimension of IFAs but
also with regard to their focus on fundamental human and labour rights,
the representation and involvement of the global workforce constitute
important issues. For the time being, the home-country labour movement
plays a central role in the monitoring processes, an aspect that is
probably as much to do with the institutional platform for industrial relations
that exists in the home country, as well as the often weaker trade
union capacity in MNCs’ foreign operations. Of the 62 IFAs surveyed
here, 30 hold a monitoring role for the home-country trade union(s) or
employee body (24 mention only those national actors in addition to the
GUF), and 15 involve the EWC (10 mention only the EWC next to the
GUF). In Arcelor, Daimler, Falck, France Telecom, PSA Peugeot Citroën,
Renault, SKF and Volkswagen, the follow-up and monitoring of the IFA
on the labour side are entrusted to a global body (sometimes an enlarged
EWC) or world works council. This central role of EWCs is very much
a specificity of IFAs in the IMF domain (although there has been debate
about representation via EWCs — see IMF, 2006).
The emergence of such questions of representation and the division
of labour within the international labour movement is a logical consequence
of the extension of transnational industrial relations. This is complicated
by the “dual face” of IFAs, namely the fact that they are directed
at the MNC at the same time as they are directed at the value chain.
Thus, the substantive as well as the procedural elements tend to be
directed at established institutions of industrial relations in lead firms,
which are linked to their suppliers via highly interdependent industrialrelations
forms of coordination, and operate in the formal labour market.
This does not mean that IFAs cannot be useful in a buyer-driven context
— indeed they are, with some strategic adaptations to the particular challenges.
The initial problem is to negotiate IFAs in the first place (Miller,
this volume; 2004). The conclusions aim to elaborate on this context in
more detail.
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