On 26 October 2020 a call zoom was held for the launch of the project “Let Us Participate! Cross-border reorganization and the future of employee involvement in corporate governance“. Which was attended by the representatives of the organizations involved in the project.

It began with a brief presentation of the project partners and their activities and then moved on to analyse in detail the objectives of the project and the planned activities.

The project is the answer to the problem of insufficient employee involvement in the decision-making strategies taken within companies in the field of transnational corporate reorganization. The key objective of the project is increased employee involvement in the face of transnational reorganization of undertakings achieved till the completion of the project through improved knowledge and awareness of the EU law, strengthened transnational cooperation and joint action plan aimed to reinforce the effectiveness of work of EWCs and board-level workers’ representatives in the face of reorganization of business across national borders.

The specific objectives of the project are the following:

• EU legislation on employee involvement and the postulates of workers and employers converted in the action plan, including concrete responses to the challenges posed to employee involvement by globalization prior to project completion;
• Increase of the democratic capacity at company level in the era of globalization of the 17 leading organizations of the social partners of 5 EU Member States and 1 candidate country, achieved through the implementation of seminars for the development of skills
• Strengthening of transnational cooperation between the representatives of workers and employers of 5 EU Member States and 1 Candidate Country in order to improve the anticipation of change and favor the participatory management of transnational reorganization processes in companies up to completion of the project;
• Better transnational coordination of actions taken by workers’ and employers’ representatives in order to develop effective methods for exercising workers’ rights to information, consultation and participation in the context of the transnational corporate reorganization achieved up to the end of the project through the distribution of the action plan and the video tutorial;
• Familiarization of the social partners and social actors at company level with EU legislation and policies in the context of employee involvement and transnational agreements of companies in the context of transnational mobility and reorganization (conversions, mergers, divisions) until completion of the project, through the implementation of strategic seminars for the enhancement of skills, development of video tutorials and complete awareness and dissemination activities;

Establishment of new EWCs, promoted until the completion of the project, through the inclusion of this postulate in the action plans and the explanation of the steps to establish the EWC and the role of the EWCs, in the context of the cross-border reorganization of companies, in the video tutorial.

Having illustrated the objectives of the project, the partners focused on presenting the research phase and its methodology. After this meeting, each national expert will in fact have to make a first contribution on cross-border mergers, referring to EU Directives 2005/56 / EC and 2017/1132, with particular attention to the role of employee participation. This report will be useful for the discussion of the first workshop and subsequently the national experts will have to prepare two more reports, one on employee participation at company board level and one on the role of European works councils.

The IPA is committed to sharing with partners and national experts a series of questions and the setting for the research phase in order to homogenize all the works and make the project’s goal more profitable.