IR Notes

This is an important transnational agreement. Its signatories rightly describe it as “an ambitious and unprecedented initiative and agenda, which will require a very significant resource investment”. In this agreement, the European Works Council reaffirms a position taken previously (Barcelona Agenda Roadmap), which stated firstly that pursuing profit blindly, and ignoring the needs of the workforce, is unsustainable, and secondly, that productivity dividends must therefore also be used to invest in employees. The European Framework-Agreement on the Future of Work, signed on 6 March, between Unilever’s management and its European Works Council, includes measures that management has promised to fund with a “sufficient budget”. These involve: 1/ forming joint working “teams” in every country to establish individual training plans for each site and each employee; 2/ asking these joint teams to draw up “employability programmes” for locations where the deployment of digitalisation is likely to negatively impact job numbers; 3/ engage with employee representatives to explore new models of employment that will simultaneously meet the business’s needs for flexibility and workers’ needs for security. The text encourages local agreements on pilot experiments. The next stage is to arrive at “co-creations”, without in the process challenging either unilateral decisions taken by management or collective bargaining. 4/ engaging, likewise, in discussions on professional transitions, either inside or outside Unilever, again with the aim of “co-creating”. In practice, the signatories are calling for joint working “teams” to be set up within the framework of new forms of cooperation, in order to “identify new solutions” that will deal with “new issues” before their disruptive effects make themselves felt. Every country is therefore being invited to choose to create a joint working team to consider either the topics of training, qualification and employability (points 1 and 2), or those of sustainable employment and the future of work, which includes new forms of employment or the ways in which work or working hours are organised (points 3 and 4). The European Works Council will monitor the work undertaken and any pilot experiments performed. The agreement will be published on line here as soon as we have the green light from the European Works Council.

Protection for whistleblowers : On 11 March, the European Council and Parliament reached a provisional political agreement on the directive on protection for whistleblowers, approving the position adopted by the European Parliament in November 2018 (see IR Notes 97). The Member States that wanted to force whistleblowers to report information internally on harm done to the public interest, i.e. directly to the organisation they are holding to account, have had to yield. In accordance with the wishes of many NGOs and the trade unions, the text offers the whistleblower freedom of choice when it comes to selecting a reporting channel. “The agreement reached on Monday evening is a major step forward for our democracy”, says Virginie Rozière (S&D), who is the rapporteur for the directive on protection for whistleblowers (see IR Notes 109).

Civil aviation : On 1 March, the European Commission published a report that sets out a number of actions intended to maintain and promote high social standards in the civil aviation sector (see press release). It does not announce any binding measures but initiates work on several projects and lays down a number of red lines. For example, it indicates that a pilot who works for only one airline and is paid by the latter while operating under its orders, cannot be deemed a self-employed worker.
> see reactions of the European Transport Workers’ Federation (ETF press release) and the European Cockpit Association (ECA press release).

• Publication of “country reports”: On 27 February, as part of the European Semester exercise, the European Commission published a communication and the 28 country reports providing a detailed analysis of the economic and social challenges specific to each Member State and the national policies being implemented (see press release issued by the Commission). The European Trade Union Confederation says it is disappointing that “very little reference is made to the need to increase wages” (see press release).

• Posting of workers : By means of an order dated 20 February, the government incorporated Directive (EU) 2018/957 on the posting of workers in the framework of the provision of services, into French law.

• Teachers’ strike : The main teachers’ trade union, ZNP, has called for a general strike on 8 April, during the school examination period. The second-largest trade union in the sector, Solidarność, is not yet certain whether it will join in this industrial action, but this looks fairly likely (see article).

• Recruitment of disabled employees : Law n° 4/2019 of 10 January 2019 establishes a quota system intended to boost recruitment of disabled persons in the private sector and in some public bodies. It applies to medium-sized businesses (with 75 or more employees), which will have to ensure that at least 1% of their workforce are employees with disabilities. The rate rises to 2% for businesses with at least 250 employees.

Failure to consult the works council : On 22 February, the Bobigny regional court ordered the French railway company SNCF to pay damages for acting unlawfully in connection with the sale, in 2017, of its logistics subsidiary STVA (2,150 employees), which operates in eight European countries (see judgment). Management only informed the company’s European Works Council of its plans, at the Council’s request, at the plenary meeting held in June 2017, without consulting it. The court held that: 1/ the sell-off was “transnational in nature and [it] came within the scope of the European Works Council’s right to information; 2/ the quality of the information provided to the European Works Council was inadequate; 3/ the decision to privatise the STVA group via an invitation to tender was taken in the last quarter of 2016, i.e. before the European Works Council held its plenary meeting. Consequently, it appears that the works council was “informed late” of the sell-off and also “inadequately, such that the procedure associated with the European Works Council’s right to information was impeded”. The court pointed out that “consultation must be carried out in a timely manner, i.e. prior to the decision to sell off the business”. The court held that because STVA no longer belonged to SNCF but to the CAT group, the sell-off “involved a change of employer for STVA’s employees”, which “substantially affects their interests, and SNCF therefore had a duty to consult the European Works Council”. Secondly, “the means whereby the CAT group promised [, etc.] not to carry out any restructuring linked to the acquisition in France is ineffective”: it can “be rescinded at any time”, applies “only to France” and is valid “only for three years”. The European Works Council has expressed its satisfaction with the judgment on its website (see press release).

• Brexit: On 19 December 2018, the management of the Suez group (5,600 employees) and the company’s European Works Council signed an amendment to the agreement on the establishment of a European Works Council, with a view to managing the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU. The text is meant to be general in scope and stipulates that the representatives of a company located in a country that is leaving the EU, “may retain full member status in the EWC if their company”: 1/ remains attached to the Group’s European scope; 2/ has an annual turnover that represents a significant portion of the Group’s overall results; 3/ has around 1,000 employees. On the other hand, according to the Safran European Works Council (see press release), the aerospace parts supplier’s management announced, on 5 March, that in the event of a “No Deal Brexit”, the British delegation would no longer sit on the European Works Council (the United Kingdom, with 4,300 employees, is the group’s second-largest country, in terms of workforce size).


• Restructuring: The European trade-union federation IndustriAll Europe is mobilising to support its affiliates and the Honda employees impacted by the Japanese car maker’s decision to close its plant in the United Kingdom (see press release). For its part, the European Works Council is claiming that it should be consulted on this decision, whereas the company’s management, according to the Secretary of the Works Council, is of the opinion that this is a purely national project that does not need to be referred to the European Works Council.

Trade-union network meeting : On 26 February, trade unions in the Circle Media Group (5,000 employees in nine Member States) adopted a declaration, expressing their concern at the way the group is being managed and calling for the creation of a European Works Council (see press release). The company’s management reacted to this challenge (see press release), following which UNI Europa called for a meeting to be arranged (see press release).

• Fundamental labour rights: The UNI Global Union federation has called on the management of the Teleperformance call-centre company (300,000 employees) to show more respect for fundamental labour rights and human rights (see press release).


• Sexual harassment: On 1 February, at a meeting of the committee tasked with monitoring its international framework agreement, the management of the pen manufacturer Faber-Castell (8,000 employees) indicated that it was drawing up a code of conduct that would include a strong policy on sexual harassment (see press release).

A minimum European income : On 20 February, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) adopted an opinion entitled “For a European Framework Directive on a Minimum Income”, prepared by Georges Dassis (see photo), who is a member of the EESC Workers’ Group and a former EESC President, in which he calls on the European Commission to establish a binding framework setting an adequate minimum income, tailored to the living standard in every Member State (see press release).

In this section, our aim is not to influence your vote in the forthcoming European elections, but to inform you of initiatives seeking to open up a debate on the future of the European Union or to put forward proposals here and now.

> In this edition, this time we are highlighting a political initiative: the platform established by French President Emmanuel Macron, called “For European renewal“, which has been – and this is a first – published in all European languages and in many newspapers across the EU. The EU, which “has always defined the standards of progress” and is where social security “was created”, “needs to drive forward a project of convergence rather than competition”. It must provide every worker with “a social shield guaranteeing the same pay in the same workplace, and a minimum European wage appropriate to each country and discussed collectively every year”. Also, a new mobile app, available in 24 languages, has been developed by the European Parliament to tell people how the EU is fashioning our daily lives.