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

Transnational collective bargaining at company level – da Costa and Rehfeldt
The second such agreement was signed in 1986 between the French
group Danone and the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel,
Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Association (IUF),
that is, directly at international level, even though it had only a Europewide
application. It paved the way for Danone and the IUF in 1988 to
sign what is generally considered the first IFA between an MNE and an
ITS (see for example Gallin, this volume).
The Thomson agreement served as a precedent for negotiations
between other nationalized French MNEs and the EMF and other European
industry federations for the creation of what were then called European
group committees. This movement inspired German unions to
negotiate similar agreements, most of which were signed by German
works councils and only very few were co-signed by European industry
federations (Rehfeldt, 1993, pp. 78ff). Altogether, 32 such agreements
were signed between 1985 and 1994, including some by Scandinavian
MNEs and an Italian MNE (Kerckhofs, 2002, p. 11).
Some of the French and German agreements served as models for
the Directive of 22 September 1994 on European Works Councils (the
EWC Directive). Article 6 of the Directive introduced an obligation,
from 22 September 1996, to negotiate the establishment of an EWC
between the MNE and a “special negotiation body”, with no statutory
trade union presence. Article 13 exempted from this obligation those
MNEs that had already signed a voluntary EWC agreement before this
date. The consequence was an explosion of “voluntary” agreements in the
weeks prior to 22 September 1996. More than 300 “Article 13 agreements”
were signed in 1996. European industry federations signed or
co-signed nearly one third of these and they continued to sign some Article
6 agreements subsequently (Kerckhofs, 2002, p. 35).
Why did it take such a long time to arrive at these developments in
the area of transnational collective bargaining, seen first in Europe and
not following Levinson’s three-stage strategy? We would underline at least
three reasons. The main reason was of course the persistent refusal of the
management of most MNEs to recognize ITSs as bargaining parties, particularly
outside the European Union (EU). Another was the change in
the economic environment. As the economic crisis of the 1970s started
to show long-lasting effects on employment, the power relations between
unions and MNE employers began to shift. The unions became more
defensive, which frequently gave rise to local or national strategies of job
protection, and so making it more difficult to achieve international
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