Quality of Work and Employee Involvement in Europe

The eighteen essays in this volume concentrate on the issues surrounding workers' participation, the area of industrial relations uppermost in Marco Biagi's thinking at the time of his assassination in March 2002. The trend toward ever greater employee involvement in managerial decisionmaking has been growing in Europe for over a decade, to a significant extent as a result of Biagi's work. From the start, he clearly discerned that the key to quality of work was worker participation. This book stands not merely as a homage, but as evidence that Biagi's assassination will not affect the progress he was making. In what amounts to an integrated series of recommendations for further European legislation on workers' participation in industrial relations, the authors analyse and evaluate the following: experience gained from implementation of the European Works Council Directive and the European Company Statute Directive; implications of the new Directive on Information/Consultation in National Undertakings and of the European Forum on the Financial Participation of Workers; and experience in a variety of national contexts, including those of Japan, Italy, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Poland, and Slovenia. In the final analysis, employee involvement--when it is a genuine commitment on the part of all stakeholders--is seen as a sharing of cultural values that successfully reconciles efficiency and social justice. Those who believe this is a goal worth achieving, for reasons both economic and social, will recognize in this book an immensely valuable contribution.