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The frontiers within: why employee representatives fail to set up European works councils
Author(s) -
Whittall Michael,
Lücking Stefan,
Trinczek Rainer
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
industrial relations journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.525
H-Index - 3
eISSN - 1468-2338
pISSN - 0019-8692
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-2338.2009.00546.x
Subject(s) - directive , german , transparency (behavior) , public relations , political science , value (mathematics) , accounting , business , management , public administration , law , economics , computer science , archaeology , machine learning , history , programming language
This article reviews results of a study conducted by the Technische Universität München into why the majority of German multinationals covered by the European Works Council (EWC) Directive (1994) continue not to take advantage of this legal provision. After providing a brief outline of the project's research design, the main part of the article considers reasons why employee representatives fail to set up an EWC. As will be shown, these reasons mainly concern (i) a knowledge deficit about the EWC Directive; (ii) a lack of transparency regarding company structure; and (iii) the perceived limited value of an EWC on the part of German works councillors.