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

Cross-border social dialogue and agreements
to represent their members. … EWCs, which we stress were only given
powers of information and consultation, are not appropriate bodies for
negotiations given the current state of legislation (ETUC, 2005).
Therefore, unsurprisingly:
The first and arguably the clearest conclusion is that from the available evidence,
the practice of negotiating joint texts in EWCs is extremely rare.
The research has found only 22 examples in nine multinationals. Given
that there are probably 700 EWCs in existence, this represents only a tiny
proportion of the total (little over 1 percent) (Carley, 2001, p. 47).
The existence of joint texts in EWCs is even more rare than Carley
suggests, since he included six Danone agreements in that number. As we
have seen, these were neither negotiated nor signed by an EWC but
emerged in an entirely different context and, indeed, even before the
adoption of the EWC Directive in 1994.
This does not stop Carley from claiming that the joint IUF/Danone
committee, which met annually from 1987, was “one of the first EWCs”:
BSN/Danone thus established an EWC long before all but one or two
other firms had done so — and long before the EWC directive was proposed
— and this body (and IUF) was given a negotiating role almost a
decade before any other EWC (Carley, 2001, p. 34).
In fact, the IUF/Danone committee was not an EWC at all, since
neither the IUF nor the company could have possibly foreseen the future
creation of a body that did not exist at that time. Furthermore, although
— as Carley rightly points out — the joint IUF/Danone committee was
subsequently “formalized” by an Article 13 (of the EWC Directive) agreement
in March 1996, this joint committee has none of the typical limitations
of the EWCs (in the sense that it is vested with negotiating
powers, and is worldwide in scope). This is so precisely because it did not
originate as an EWC and therefore does not conform to the standard
EWC pattern.
One wonders which of the remaining 16 “joint texts” have been
similarly retroactively annexed to an agenda of bolstering an assumed
EWC negotiating role. The agreement of the Italian energy company ENI
of 2002, for one, is also one signed by the GUF and not by the EWC.
From the point of view of an international labour strategy, three
issues need to be resolved in a way consistent with trade union interests,
with regard to negotiations, trade unions and geography (Gallin, 2003).
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