E-OWN – Employee ownership and financial participation and its place within the European system of workers' participation
Description
Current labour relations in Europe can best be portrayed as an uncompleted jigsaw puzzle. Financial participation of workers may be one of the pieces. The project aims to find out the meaning and function of financial participation in its different forms in relationship to other instruments of information, consultation and participation. It is therefore reasonable to expect that in a modern enterprise concept mandatory participation, collective agreements and individual financial incentives will combine on the European ‘high road’. Two case studies examining this concept will be conducted, namely ThyssenKrupp (Germany) and Total (France).
Involvement as expert in an EU funded project entitled “Assessing and Benchmarking financial participation of employees in the EU-25”, managed by the Inter-University Centre at the Institute for Eastern European Studies, at Free University of Berlin, provides the opportunity to launch trade unions' views on the topic into the European debate and also to use the findings and overviews for presenting them on the worker participation on-line service of ETUI-REHS.
ETUI-REHS is invited to be actively involved in the working group of the project dealing with incidence, motives and obstacles and the motivation of social partners.
The project is a follow-up of a previous one conducted in 2005/2006 resulting in the PEPPER III report to the EU Commission in order to recommend further EU policies in the field.
It may be necessary to organise some special expertise for preparation of the ETUI-REHS involvement and adapting final results to the needs of the trade union debate.
Researchers
Dr. Norbert Kluge
Senior researcher. Head of the ETUI-REHS SEEurope projectphone: +32 (0) 2 224 05 08
