EU company law consultation
CEC European Managers has participated in the consultation on EU company law launched by DG Justice of the European Commission. In its response, CEC highlighted the absence in the text of the consultation of any reference to the employment and labour rights-related implications of EU company law.
The consultation on EU company law that ran until August 2017 is the result of stakeholder calls for EU action on cross-border conversions, the use of digital technologies throughout a company’s lifecycle and on cross-border mergers and divisions. Today, conflict-of-law rules already exist in civil and commercial law for contract, tort and delict, and insolvency, but an important gap remains for the law applicable to companies. The aim of this public consultation was to collect input from stakeholders on problems in company law, gather evidence of such problems and ask their views on possible solutions on how to address the problems at EU level.
CEC European Managers regret to see that no reference in the text is made to the acquired rights of workers’ in terms of information and participation in the adoption of the decisions concerning the undertaking. CEC believes that any initiative going in the direction of modernising the current state of EU company law by rationalising the current provisions on cross-border operations should not overlook the necessity to restate the safeguard of acquired rights of workers, including information, consultation and involvement ones.
Given the Commission’s apparent intention to significantly facilitate cross-border transnational mobility of companies, CEC is concerned that the existing legal framework with regard to employee participation at the company-level will no longer be able to offer a comprehensive protection of acquired rights and might not even ensure that the existing negotiating model will be applicable in all forms of cross-border mobility.
Therefore, CEC sees a necessity for a general and comprehensive set of rules with minimum standards regulating employees’ participation rights for all forms and variants of cross-border mobility of companies within the EU.
Please find the response to the consultation below
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