The European Company: Original expectations and deficiencies of implementation

Abstract

We address the failures of the implementation of the European Company Directive and their far-reaching consequences, and discuss options for necessary amendments and improvements. We present empirical data on the characteristics of European companies and their distribution across EU Member States, and discuss major unexpected results of transposition and implementation as well as many evident problems. We then develop options for amendments, including definition of structural changes, mandatory introduction of employee involvement and extension of the ‘before and after’ principle. Finally, we analyse the history of the review process and explain why amendments have not and will most likely not be introduced despite obvious failures and deficiencies.

Transnational employee voice and knowledge exchange in the multinational corporation: The European Company (SE) experience

“…Second, we focused on SEs that have established not only SE works councils (which are mandatory) but also transnational board-level employee representation (which is subject to negotiation). These remain a rare phenomenon, with by mid-2018 only 73 existing SEs having agreed employee board representation (Keller and Rosenbohm, 2019). Third, we focused on large companies, namely those with more than 3000 employees, as we expected these to face the greatest challenge in transforming well-established national employee voice into transnational employee voice.…”

“…Much debate on transnational employee voice arrangements occurring in company operations raises concerns in regard to company power to circumvent or weakly adopt employee voice practices and deflect trade union demands (Baccaro and Howell, 2017; Keller and Rosenbohm, 2019; Pulignano and Waddington, 2019). We share those concerns.…”

Can access to company boards improve transnational employee representation? Insights from employee representation in European Companies

“…In the remaining cases, no form of transnational employee representation has been agreed on because the negotiations were either not commenced or terminated by the special negotiating body or not initiated at all. The latter option is particularly evident for the activation of so-called 'shelf SEs' (Keller and Rosenbohm, 2020).…”

“…The other group contains so-called ‘shelf SEs’, which were set up without any operations or employees, but also SEs with very few employees and SEs where precise information is lacking (see for more details Stollt and Kelemen, 2013). Currently, SEs are registered in 28 of the 30 EEA countries, but with a highly uneven distribution (see also Keller and Rosenbohm, 2020): more than 80 per cent of all existing SEs are registered in Czechia and Germany. This skewed distribution becomes even more apparent when considering only ‘normal SEs’, 56 per cent of which (395 SEs) are registered in Germany.…”

“…For the German context, previous research has shown that in some cases this supranational corporate legal form was adopted shortly before the company reached the employee threshold for German co-determination (Rosenbohm, 2014). In effect, this has allowed for a pre-emptive escape from co-determination, in which the existing level of co-determination is either ‘frozen’ in its current form or avoided entirely (Keller and Rosenbohm, 2020; Keller and Werner, 2012).…”