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

Cross-border social dialogue and agreements
These modifications were aimed at securing employers’ approval of
the directive, since the reaction of MNEs and of the Union of Industrial
and Employers’ Confederations of Europe (UNICE) to the project had
been extremely negative. For the latter, the OECD Guidelines were quite
sufficient and there was no need for European legislation. This position
had the support of the UK Government of Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher. The threat of using its right of veto at the Council of Ministers
was enough to prevent the adoption of the directive — at least until
1994 when the Council of Ministers, by qualified majority voting,
adopted the EWC Directive. (The new voting procedure was made possible
by changes to the European Treaties at Maastricht in 1992.)
The EWC Directive, which came into force on 22 September 1996,
was partly inspired by the second version of the Vredeling project. It does
not include mandatory bargaining in cases of restructuring but, instead,
mandatory bargaining for the constitution of a body of employee representatives
for the purposes of information and consultation in all MNEs
employing at least 1,000 employees within the European Economic Area
(EU plus Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein) and at least 150 in more
than one Member State. It has nonetheless encouraged a particular form
of transnational collective bargaining. The agreements for setting up
EWCs constitute a particular European experience with transnational
collective bargaining and, for the moment, the largest number of transnational
collective agreements at company level, although they only concern
procedures of representation and of information and consultation,
and not concrete employment conditions.
The EWC Directive seems modest from a legal perspective since it
only grants information and consultation rights. It is not law concerning
either trade unions or collective bargaining. There is currently no European
legislation on transnational collective bargaining at company level,
only on collective bargaining and tripartite consultation at the intersector
and sector levels. Moreover, following the position of the UK Government,
the Social Protocol — annexed to the Maastricht Treaty (1992)
and subsequently the Amsterdam Treaty (1997) — explicitly refused to
transfer legislative competence on wages, union rights or the right to
strike to the EU. This makes it difficult in some EU Member States to
organize solidarity strikes during transnational collective bargaining.
The EWC Directive, however, does not exclude an evolution of
the bargaining practices of the parties towards transnational collective
bargaining at company level on a voluntary basis. From a sociological
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