“…At the initial stage of implementation of the Directive, it appeared that trade unions (at least in Czechia, Poland and Slovakia) were sceptical towards works councils, seeing them more as competition than allies (Tholen, 2017). In general, wherever introduction of works councils into the national institutional framework was triggered directly by implementation of the Directive, they struggled to become embedded (for example, Blanpain and Lyutov, 2014;Skorupińska-Cieślak, 2023), as indicated by their limited incidence and coverage. It would be unfair, however, to ignore the fact that the structure of the enterprise sector has played a significant part in hampering the progress of works councils.…”