Conference Paper: 'Are European fundamental rights to information and consultation getting diluted by national implementations? Study on implementation of European Works Councils Directive 2009/38/EC in the field of access to justice'

EWC access to justice

By Romuald Jagodzinski

The ETUI continues its research on EWCs' access to justice. During the 2014 Industrial Relations in Europe Conference (IREC) conference 'IREC 2014 - The future of the European Social Model – New perspectives for industrial relations, social and employment policy in Europe?' held at the Eurofound in Dublin on 12-14 September 2014 a paper by Romuald Jagodziński discussing implementation of sanctions for violation of EWC laws across Europe was presented.

The paper '114 - Are European fundamental rights to information and consultation getting diluted by national implementations? Study on implementation of European Works Councils Directive 2009/38/EC in the field of access to justice' by Romuald Jagodziński presents in more detail findings and discusses problems with implementation presented earlier in an ETUI Policy Brief 'Implementation of enforcement provisions of the European Works Councils Recast Directive: are sanctions really ‘effective, proportionate and dissuasive’?' (download here) as well as on earlier publication in the ETUC and ETUI 'Benchmarking Working Europe 2014' (Chapter 7).

Among others, it highlights the problem of excessive and incoherent sanctions foreseen across the EU member states. In this context it discusses possible solutions and provides examples of legislative means from other areas of the EU law. The paper also elaborates on the meaning of 'effective, dissuasive and proportionate' sanctions and discusses these requirements set by the EWC Recast Directive in the context of laws available on national level.

A full volume presenting findings on EWCs' access to justice (comprising sanctions, access to courts, legal standing, financing of lawsuits) will be published by the ETUI towards the end of 2015.

In the meantime a revised version of the conference paper will be published as a chapter in an edited volume by the ETUI 'Monitoring implementation of the EWC Recast Directive 2009/38' in autumn 2015.