MANIC - Provisions and practices of Managing Industrial Change with Workers' Involvement
Description
This project, which will run over two years, aims to link workers' participation to the challenges of workers and their trade unions in the situation of industrial change at the enterprise level, while taking into account the impact of industrial policy. In a European perspective the project prepares examples of restructuring in different cross-border operating enterprises and different places. Examples will come mainly from the car industries. The case studies will be evaluated pertaining to the criteria social accountability of the change process. The aim is to create typologies of models that can explain how enterprises and their employees can contribute to the establishment of the European social model and meet the Lisbon strategy targets.
The project will be structured in two main sections:
- Comprehensive description of employees' and trade unions' opportunities to intervene in the change processes by using their rights on information, consultation, participation as well as negotiations, and this against the background of the EU internal market provisions, competition rules and procedures (e.g. merger control), at national (approx. ten countries) and at European level.
The research will include the aspect of trade union as employee representatives implementing comprehensive forms of coordination between national/local and EU level in order to investigate this as a possible opportunity to intervene in the changes process. There will be a special focus on the main coordination processes and circumstances in order to analyse the cause and effects.
- Evaluation of national and cross-border company cases from Belgium, Germany, Italy and Sweden.
Trade unions may expect profit from the project by getting an evaluation of the social effectiveness of applying regulations at national and EU-level, beside a comprehensive description of change processes, underlined by real empirical practices.
Researchers
Dr. Norbert Kluge
Senior researcher. Head of the ETUI-REHS SEEurope projectphone: +32 (0) 2 224 05 08
