Works Councils

La reforma de la Gesetz zur Reform des  Betriebsverfassungsgesetzes en Alemania pretende fortalecer el derecho de participación de los representantes de los trabajadores en las empresas y, al mismo tiempo, adaptar la Ley de Comités de Empresa, invariable en lo sustancial desde hacía varias décadas, a las nuevas formas de organización del trabajo. Entre otras medidas, el legislador alemán ha incrementado el número de miembros del comité de
empresa, el número de representantes «liberados», ha simplificado el procedimiento electoral, ha aceptado la participación en el mismo de los trabajadores en misión y ha consolidado la delegación juvenil. Finalmente, se han adoptado también importantes medidas contra actitudes xenófobas o de discriminación sexual en el centro de trabajo y en el propio seno del comité de empresa.

This book chapter describes two case studies on how management and the works council of a Dutch government organization and a Dutch health organization came to integrative agreements on organizational HR policies and social plans, via cocreation and collaborative negotiation.

I argue here for a conception of workers' councils that are embedded within the architecture of the modern state and parliamentary government as opposed to anti-statist and romantic conceptions of workers' councils. I defend the idea of what I call " council republicanism " that blends the institution of workers councils with the institutions of the modern constitutional state in order to secure and expand the institutional capacities of workers councils. A second purpose of this theory of council republicanism is to achieve the maximization of the twin principles of non-domination in social relations as well as the need to orient social and economic activities toward common purposes and not particular, private purposes and ends. I argue that council republicanism can therefore provide us with a persuasive and compelling model toward which worker movements toward a deeper reality of democracy can provide.

The importance of Hannah Arendt’s intellectual dialogue with her husband, Heinrich Blücher is widely acknowledged, yet it has rarely been systematically studied. In this paper, I use Blücher’s lectures to highlight the way some of his reflections and insights shed new light on Arendt’s political thought. Blücher, I seek to show, offers through the figure of Socrates an alternative under­standing of the meaning of philosophy and its relation to politics. His reflections help us see that Arendt worked with two conceptions of philosophy: not only the dominant one in the Western philosophical tradition, of which she was famously critical, but also an alternative one in which philosophy and politics become mutually supportive, rather than mutually exclusive activities. What emerges from the comparison between Arendt’s and Blücher’s reflections on the relationship between philosophy and politics, I argue, is a joint and life-long commitment on the part of both to question the philosophical tradition in order to offer new theoretical foundations for participatory democratic citizenship.

Artículo en el que se efectúa un examen crítico de los pronunciamientos que recientemente ha dictado el Tribunal Supremo con ocasión de conflictos en los que debía de determinarse los efectos de la terminación de la ultraactividad. El artículo destaca las contradicciones que, en la propia doctrina del Tribunal, plantea la contractualización como construcción dogmática en la que sostener la continuidad de las condiciones de trabajo reguladas en el convenio vencido.


This article examines recent Supreme Court pronouncements on the occasion of conflicts in which the effects of the termination of ultractivity were to be determined. The article highlights the contradictions that, in the Court's own doctrine, contractualization as a dogmatic construction.

Die niederländischen Betriebsräte haben gemäß den Bestimmungen des Betriebsrätegesetzes (WOR) Informations- und Konsultationsrechte, die mit den Normen des deutschen Betriebsverfassungsgesetzes (BetrVG) vergleichbar sind. Darüber hinaus gewährt das niederländische Betriebsrätegesetz den Interessenvertretungen das Recht auf Weiterbildung und auf externe Expertise. Die dafür anfallenden Kosten werden aus einem zentralen, vom Gesetzgeber vorgesehenen Fond finanziert. Nicht zuletzt mit Blick auf die finanziellen Aufwendungen, die für die Betriebsratstätigkeit erforderlich sind, wird deren Effektivität immer wieder öffentlich diskutiert. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über Studien aus den Niederlanden, die die Arbeitsweisen und Wirkungen der Betriebsratsarbeit analysiert haben.

This policy brief examines if and how the reformulated obligation in the Recast European Works Council Directive to report back found its way into EWC agreements by looking at survey data, results of large-scale agreement analysis and by providing examples of clauses in which this obligation is reflected.

Although most EWC representatives state that they do report back to the employees, and most EWC agreements have specific rules referring to this duty, the clauses are generally vague as they do not specify who, when, and how the employee representatives should perform their duties.

This policy brief provides policy makers and researchers with an insight into how a changed regulation (EWC Recast Directive) affected the EWC agreements. Additionally, it gives tools to practitioners on the field by providing good and bad examples of agreement clauses.

This article examines the impact of management attitudes towards human resource management (HRM) practices on the presence of works councils in German small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Based on a survey among executives of German SMEs, the key result of a logit regression analysis is that managers' attitudes towards key HRM practices have a strong impact on the prevalence of the works council in German SMEs. In particular, positive management attitudes towards individual employee participation and direct supervision seem to be detrimental for the institutionalization of works councils. The results suggest that there is more diversity and management choice regarding the institutions of industrial relations than generally expected in the case of German firms.

The Labour Code of the Russian Federation was amended in 2013 in a way that a new body of workers’ representation — works councils — can be established. These amendments don’t add any new rights or obligations neither to employers nor to employees. They are made with purely political purposes and only imitate the creation of the analog of the well-known German system of works councils.
The author comes to conclusion that currently existing rights in informing and “taking into account” the workers’ representative body opinion, contained in the Russian Labour Code, are not sufficient for
existence of the real industrial democracy. The article is aimed at answering the question, whether an implementation of functioning works councils may be beneficial to the adequate balancing of social rights of workers and economic rights of the employers. Although the full transposition of the German works councils system seems to be impossible, some of its positive features may be effectively
adopted in the Russian law. For example, the employer’s obligation to consult workers shouldn’t be dependent on the existence of the workers’ representative bodies. Besides, a range of issues that are subject to the mandatory informing of workers by the employer must be significantly broadened. The procedure of consultations must include the real negotiations between the employer and employees on the basis of good faith principle.