In October 2001, the EU formally adopted the legislation on the European Company, also known by its Latin name Societas Europaea (SE). This handbook aims to ensure that the new opportunities for employee representation at European level which these new SE rules provide, are seized. It has been designed first and foremost to help practitioners to prepare and conduct negotiations on agreements on employee involvement in SEs. The handbook introduces the SE and its mechanism of employee involvement. It explains the negotiation procedures and provides ‘tips and tricks’ for a decent preparation of negotiations. Based on the experience of several experts, it gives an overview of key aspects of an SE agreement and includes an extensive set of overviews, graphics and comparative tables.
Investigates employee participation in different national settings and the relationship between participation and a nation's industrial relations system. Includes a discussion of the convergence of labour relations systems impelled by Community law and looks at employee participation and technological change. Covers the period from the 1950s to 1993.
Bringing together a collection of respected contributors, this book explores how employee representatives perform their jobs as members of the European Works Councils.
Employee participation encompasses the range of mechanisms used to involve the workforce in decisions at all levels of the organization - whether direct or indirect - conducted with employees or through their representatives. In its various guises, the topic of employee participation has been a recurring theme in industrial relations and human resource management. One of the problems in trying to develop any analysis of participation is that there is potentially limited overlap between these different disciplinary traditions, and scholars from diverse traditions may know relatively little of the research that has been done elsewhere. Accordingly in this book, a number of the more significant disciplinary areas are analysed in greater depth in order to ensure that readers gain a better appreciation of what participation means from these quite different contextual perspectives. Not only is there a range of different traditions contributing to the research and literature on the subject, there is also an extremely diverse sets of practices that congregate under the banner of participation. The handbook discusses various arguments and schools of thought about employee participation, analyzes the range of forms that participation can take in practice, and examines the way in which it meets objectives that are set for it, either by employers, trade unions, individual workers, or, indeed, the state. In doing so, the Handbook brings together leading scholars from around the world who present and discuss fundamental theories and approaches to participation in organization as well as their connection to broader political forces. These selections address the changing contexts of employee participation, different cultural/ institutional models, old/'new' economy models, shifting social and political patterns, and the correspondence between industrial and political democracy and participation.
This title was first published in 2001. Management of the employment relationship changed markedly in the last two decades of the 21st century, and a major part of this has been the extension of employee involvement and participation in the workplace. Modern management theorists and researchers have commonly emphasized the importance of two-way communication and co-operation between management and labour in determining the success of human resource management (HRM) strategy and in maximizing workplace efficiency. Some researchers argue employee participation and empowerment are progressive management practices which have universal benefits to performance enhancement, as opposed to most other HRM practices whose success is contingent upon the organizational context. This title explores these themes through an international collection of case studies, which are the outcome of a comparative project of the Workers' Participation Study Group of the International Industrial Relations Association (IIRA).
This title was first published in 2000: The contributions to this volume have been brought together and edited from presentations made to a two-day seminar held in Brussels with the financial and organisational support of the social affairs directorate of the European Commission on 15th and 16th May 1995. That seminar provided an important first opportunity, following accession to membership of the European Community by Finland and Sweden, for representatives of the Commission to discuss with delegates from all of the significant labour market organisations throughout the Nordic countries some of the challenges and fears raised by the superimposition of a European-level framework upon the fabled social structures of those Nordic countries.
In the eyes of many, one of the most challenging problems of the information society is that we are faced with an ever expanding mass of information. Based on the work done within the European Network of Excellence (NoE) on the Future of Identity in Information Society (FIDIS), a set of authors from different disciplinary backgrounds and jurisdictions share their understanding of profiling as a technology that may be preconditional for the future of our information society.
Is the EU enlargement the success EU institutions proclaim? Based on fifteen years of fieldwork research across Central and Eastern Europe and on migrants in the UK and Germany, this book provides a less glittering answer. The EU has betrayed hopes of social cohesion: social regulations have been forgotten, multinationals use threats of relocations, and workers, left without institutional channels to voice their concerns, have reacted by leaving their countries en masse. Yet migration, for many, increases social vulnerability. Drawing on Hirschman’s concepts of ‘Exit’ and ‘Voice’, the book traces the origins of such failures in the management of EU enlargement as a pure economic and market-creating exercise, neglecting the inherently political nature of labour relations. The reinforcement of market mechanisms without political counterbalances has resulted in an increase in opportunistic ‘exit’ behaviour by both employers and employees, and thereby in a worsening quality of democracy, at workplace, national and European levels. As a result of this process, the EU has become more similar to the North American Free Trade Agreement between USA, Canada and Mexico, where social rights are marginalized and economic integration does not translate into better development.
