Arrangements for employee representation at board level in the EU countries plus Norway can be divided into three groups. There is a group of ten countries where there is no board level representation and a further group of six, where board level representation is limited to state-owned or recently privatised companies. However, the biggest group of 12 states provides for employees to be represented on the boards of private companies, once they have reached a certain size. These thresholds vary greatly as do other elements of the national arrangements.

Employee representatives at board level

A majority of the 27 states of the EU plus Norway provide for employee representation at board level, although in some this is limited to companies owned in whole or part by the state or recently privatised.

Only in ten countries are there no arrangements for board level representation. These are Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta (where only companies owned by the union or Labour Party have employee directors), Portugal, Romania and the United Kingdom. It could also be argued that neither Cyprus nor Portugal should be included in this list. In Cyprus, trade union representatives have recently been appointed to the boards of two banks, and, in Portugal, there is a constitutional right to be present at board level in state-owned companies, although it has never been implemented.

There are a further five countries, where board level representation is limited to some state-owned or municipally-owned companies. These are Belgium (although here very few companies are covered), Greece, Ireland, Poland (where partially-privatised companies are also covered, although the government is looking at reducing employee representation at board level)) and Spain (where local savings banks plus some publicly owned companies have board level representation). In addition, in France, board-level representation is extended to recently privatised companies, and French companies can also decide voluntarily to have employee representatives at board level.

This leaves 12 countries, the largest group, where employee representation at board level extends to private companies, although, in some of them, there are different arrangements or different employment thresholds for state-owned companies. The countries in this group are: Austria, the Czech Republic (although the government is considering making this optional), Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden. The thresholds for representation range from 25 employees in Sweden to 1,000 in Luxembourg.

As well as the thresholds, there are differences in the proportion of board seats taken by employee representatives, ranging from a quarter, in Finland, to a half, in some companies in Germany and Slovenia, and in whether the representatives take their seats on a supervisory board, as in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, or on a single tier board, as in Denmark or Sweden.

These differences are examined at greater length is the country sections, as well as other differences. These include the limits on the powers of employee members (in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, for example, they cannot deal with collective bargaining issues), and the arrangements for their appointments (in the Netherlands neither employees nor those who bargain with the company are eligible, while the German rules specifically provided for the election of external union officials in the case of larger companies).