I am back in Sitges, Barcelona, doing what I do best. Running a training program during the coming week on negotiating your European Works Council (EWC) agreement, days after the European Parliament voted to approve a revised version of the EWC Directive, which dates back to 1994, and was subsequently updated in 2009. I’ll come back to the Directive a little later in this piece.
I first came to Sitges about 25 years ago, and immediately fell in love with the place. Sitges has a long history, dating back to Roman times, but more recently it was a centre of the “counterculture” during the days of the Franco regime in Spain. I like it for that alone. As you walk into town from the old port, you can see where the Republicans built gun emplacements ready to engage with the Francoists. “No pasarán”. The heart skips a beat.
Every time I come here, I am reminded that I must go back and reread Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, his book about the Spanish Civil War. I will definitely do it this time. No writer is more relevant to the times we live in than Orwell, with nascent totalitarianism rampant, and freedoms that we hold dear under threat. Strongmen promise the moons and the stars and the rest of the heavens. They only ever deliver pain and sorrow and hate and never-ending cruelty.
Today, Sitges is an extremely family-friendly town, but it also has a vibrant gay culture. Sit outside any bar and watch the world in all its differences walk by. Sitges seems to me to be a melting pot where people can live their lives as they please, without rancour. Would that all European towns and cities could be the same.
This week, Sitges hosts its annual Fantastic Film festival, one of the biggest such festivals in the world. Do not be surprised if, as you walk down the street, you meet an Ewok out of Star Wars, or a vampire sits down beside you to have a glass of cava. It is always good to have a chat with a vampire. They give you a different perspective on life.
As I said above, I am back here in Sitges to run a training program, along with my long-time colleague, Alan Wild, on negotiating your EWC agreement. Alan and I have advised over one hundred major multinational undertakings on such negotiations over the years.
Last week, the European Parliament voted decisively to accept a revised version of the EWC Directive, first adopted in 1994 and last updated in 2009. For those not familiar with EWCs, they provide a forum for European-level dialogue between management and employee representatives in major transnational undertakings. A transnational undertaking is defined as any undertaking with more than 1,000 employees in the EU, and at least 150 in two different member states. Surprisingly, there are only somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 such undertakings in the EU.
EWCs are not co-decision-making or co-determination bodies. The are information and consultation forums which can offer an opinion on proposed management decisions.
As such, they fit into the European model of social partnership, of dialogue between management and labour, with its roots in multiple political traditions. For instance, the current rewrite of the EWC Directive was led by a German Christian Democrat MEP, Denis Radtke. The German Christian Democrats, while being a centre-right party, have long been influenced by Catholic social teaching, as found in such papal encyclicals as Rerum Novarum, written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, and which seeks to chart a middle way between laissez-faire capitalism and Marxist-inspired working-class socialism.
It has always seemed to me that the social dimension of the European Union as we know it today is the product of a long and continuing negotiation between Christian Democracy and Social Democracy, an attempt to find a balance between the interests of capital and labour.
This is no easy thing to do. Especially in a time of stagnant economic growth.
There is no getting away from the fact that our Western market economies are made up of multiple, competing interests, all claiming their share of the economic cake.
I do not know who first said it, but it is often attributed to President Kennedy, that a “rising tide lifts all boats”. This means that with economic growth, everyone can be better off tomorrow than they were today. For a long time after WWII, this was the European story. Not so much in recent times.
The absence of growth results in rancour. Because, as an American friend of mine says, everyone “always wants more”. And in the absence of growth, the only way that government can deliver more for some is by taking from others. Those who have to give will always resent having to give. It is just the nature of things. No point complaining about it.
Just ask the current UK Labour government about the choices it faces in the absence of robust economic growth. But then, the biggest choice the UK government could make to reboot economic growth would be to set about rejoining the European Union. But it is not going to do that because of its fear of the populist right, which caused the problem in the first place by calling for Brexit. No Sunday Scribbling would be complete without a reference to Brexit.
The rules of our European social market model are clear. Management still makes the final decision on what needs to be done. Someone has to. But it needs to listen to the voice of the workforce before making the final decision. How management hears that voice is changing. Trade unions are not the power they once were. Their membership continues to decline, as a paper in recent weeks from the OECD well documents.
European Works Councils offer one forum for employee representatives to voice workplace concerns. Management is well advised to listen to what they hear before making a final decision. But it is still management that makes the decision.
Anyway, here’s hoping that the weather in Sitges is kind to us for the coming week for our training program, so that we can have our coffee breaks and lunches on the hotel terrace in the warm southern sun, as the Mediterranean sea provides a gentle backing soundtrack.
It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.
My EWC days are over, operationally, but I remain interested in this conjunction of the business world and European political thinking.
And I loved what you had to say about Sitges and about Orwell.
Have a good session!