Board-level employee representation in Europe

1998 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-296
Author(s):  
Mark Carley

This article examines briefly the nature of employee representation on company boards, its extent in western Europe and the revival of the European Company Statute which has once again brought this form of indirect worker participation to the fore. The article goes on to outline some of the main findings of recent research by the author into board-level representation in five countries (Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland and the Netherlands), highlighting areas of diversity and of convergence.

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Lafuente Hernández

The European Company Directive anchored board-level employee representation in European law for the first time. Rules negotiated between management and worker representatives became the primary source for formulating and designing such representation as an institution of European industrial relations. However, I show that negotiated rules on board-level representation provide limited institutional leverage for European workers. I examine the fragmented and incomplete legal framework applicable, the diverse forms and patterns of negotiated rules and their potential and limitations for supporting workers’ power on boards.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Gumbrell‐McCormick ◽  
Richard Hyman

This article focuses on works councils, adopting the definition of Rogers and Streeck. It is concerned with countries with generalized systems of representation – where participation structures exist largely independently of management wishes – and not with those where representative bodies may be established voluntarily through localized management initiatives. The article also limits attention to bodies with the capacity to discuss a broad agenda of employment- and work-related issues; this means, for example, that the statutory health and safety committees, which exist in many countries without works councils, are ignored. On this definition, works councils are almost exclusively a phenomenon of continental Western Europe, and the article discusses why this is the case. Its focus is specifically on national institutions; it does not examine the one instance of mandatory supranational structures: European Works Councils. Nor does the article consider board-level employee representation.


Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta

In recantation of his earlier approach, Peter L. Berger now claims: ‘The world today, with some exceptions […], is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.’ The most important exception that Berger refers to is Western Europe. The introduction to Part II provides an overview of the religious landscape in Western Europe. The data show that the current religious situation in the countries of Western Europe is in fact subject to considerable variation. It would therefore be erroneous to describe Western Europe as secularized. At the same time, the data reveal that there have been clear secularization tendencies over the last few decades. To grasp the diversity of religious tendencies, Part II deals with three cases: West Germany with moderate downward tendencies, Italy with a considerably high degree of stability, and the Netherlands displaying disproportionately strong secularizing tendencies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrzej Zybała

This article addresses the complexity of trade-union approaches to board-level employee representation in the Visegrád countries, and the barriers it faces in particular national settings. Trade unionists in these countries accept the relevance of such employee representation in theory, but their practical agenda covers other issues which they perceive as more important as they struggle to survive at many levels of activity, and face growing existential uncertainty and risk. Unions also lack capacity to overcome obstacles such as reluctance on the part of the political class and managerial hostility to board-level representation; they cannot exert influence on major policy decisions at national level. They are operating in a more and more difficult environment, reflecting not merely a declining membership base, but also the recent economic crisis that failed to change the economic policy paradigm in the Visegrád countries: policies there still rely on a neoliberal approach and hence are not conducive to labour participation. What can still be seen as the predominant model is the traditional one of the market economy in which rights of ownership reign supreme.


Author(s):  
Elena Vladimirovna Frolova ◽  

The Netherlands is a state located in Western Europe bordering Germany and Belgium. The population of the country is just over 17million people. In terms of GDP, theNetherlands is among the twenty richest countries in the world, and in terms of exports, it is in the top ten. The average life expectancy in theNetherlands is 81.4 years; in the structure ofmortality, malignant neoplasms come out on top, which distinguishes the state from other European countries, where the main cause of deaths is cardiovascular diseases. The compulsory health insurance system was introduced in the country in 2006 after the medical reform. A distinctive feature of the Dutch healthcare system is its relative autonomy from the state, which performs only the function of an external controller, and all other powers belong to the municipal authorities. As a result, several private insurance companies have been admitted to health insurance in the Netherlands, which create healthy competition among themselves, thereby contributing to better quality and more affordable healthcare.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacomine Nortier

AbstractStraattaal (‘street language’) used by members of various ethnic groups contains linguistic material from English and several heritage languages with relatively many Sranan words. Moroccan Flavored Dutch (MFD) is Dutch with elements from Moroccan languages on the level of pronunciation, lexicon and/or grammar. Both Straattaal and MFD can be used by young Moroccan-Dutch. The basic question is: How is the use of MFD and Straattaal by Moroccan-Dutch females perceived within the Moroccan community in CMC? Data were collected by searching posts on social media. Male and female young Moroccan-Dutch comment negatively on Moroccan girls using Straattaal. However, MFD is used too, even by the same participants, receiving little overt attention. The use of and attitudes towards youth languages by females elsewhere sometimes differ from the Moroccan-Dutch context. Examples from Algeria, Indonesia and Hong Kong show that they are used by both females and men without overt negative connotations compared to Western Europe where they seem to be used predominantly by males. A possible explanation could be that there seems to be a gender restriction for varieties used as anti-languages (Halliday 1976), while youth varieties that mark socially upward mobility can be used by both males and females.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Kortmann

AbstractThis paper deals in a qualitative discourse analysis with the role of Islamic organizations in welfare delivery in Germany and the Netherlands. Referring to Jonathan Fox's “secular–religious competition perspective”, the paper argues that similar trends of exclusion of Islamic organizations from public social service delivery can be explained with discourses on Islam in these two countries. The analysis, first, shows that in the national competitions between religious and secular ideologies on the public role of religion, different views are dominant (i.e., the support for the Christian majority in Germany and equal treatment of all religions in the Netherlands) which can be traced back to the respective regimes of religious governance. However, and second, when it comes to Islam in particular, in the Netherlands, the perspective of restricting all religions from public sphere prevails which leads to the rather exclusivist view on Islamic welfare that dominates in Germany, too.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-12
Author(s):  
Wei Zheng ◽  

For medieval Europe, spices have always been of great significance, so the spice trade has become the object of competition for various countries in Western Europe. With the improvement of navigation technology, countries obsessed with spices have opened up the way to explore the origin of spices and monopolize the spices trade. Among them, the most typical country is the Netherlands. From the perspective of the spice trade, this paper discusses how the beneficiary of the spice trade, the Netherlands, has become a generation of marine hegemons by transferring spice to monopolizing the spice trade.


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