The Nine West European Multinationals: Different Patterns of the Impact on the Industrial Relations in their CEE Subsidiaries

20 years after. Changing perspectives on industrial relations in Central and Eastern Europe two decades after EU enlargement: from transition to transformation

“…Early on there were expectations that the Directive might have a stronger impact in the CEE new Member States than in the EU-15, because in the former no general regime for information and consultation had existed (for example, Donaghey et al, 2013). 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.…”

“…Debates on the ‘Europeanisation’ of industrial relations in the context of enlargement produced extremely divergent, often contradictory views. Radaelli (2004: 3) states that ‘Europeanisation consists of processes of a) construction, b) diffusion and c) institutionalisation of formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, “ways of doing things” and shared beliefs and norms which are first defined and consolidated in the EU policy process and then incorporated in the logic of domestic (national and subnational) discourse, political structures and public policies.’ The spectrum of voices in the debate ranged from optimistic expectations of spillover effects from western European FDI (for example, Galgóczi, 2003; Tholen, 2017), to claims that admission of the new Member States would only result in a clash of trade union agendas (for example, Meardi, 2002) and undermine the foundations of the European Social Model.…”