INCLUSION OF THE EMPLOYEES IN THE MANAGEMENT – AWARENESS, EXPERIMENT, MONITORING
The WIM3 project will help deepen the understanding in participating countries of the importance of employee participation schemes and will serve employer and employee representatives as a tool for sharing know-how and experience. It will be useful to familiarize all relevant stakeholders with EU law and policies, as well as to serve as a facilitator to prepare / improve new / existing employee inclusion laws, taking into account EU laws and policies.
In line with the EU’s values and needs in industrial relations, it is important to raise awareness of the importance of the role of employee representatives in companies not only in EU Member States, but also in countries that are at any stage of the process accession to the EU. To this end, two projects have been successfully implemented in the past – “WIM: Involving Employees for Better and Sustainable Management in Enterprises in Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia” and “WIM2: Employee Involvement – Directly to the Challenges”. While the purpose of the WIM project was to identify the current situation and existing legislation on the involvement of employees in enterprises (mainly) in candidate countries, and to initiate activities to introduce national social partners, bodies and actors at the company level with the content of The EU Law on Inclusion of Employees, the WIM2 project focused on seeking concrete solutions or possible ways of transferring that part of the European legal order, which refers to the participation of employees in the process
Project activities have shown that none of the EU participants has a legal framework for the participation of employees in enterprises. But all of them have well-organized unions, established at all levels – company level, branch level and national level. EU candidates should work to raise awareness of the potential benefits of implementing a model of employee participation in decision-making processes, as well as identifying challenges and mental barriers that could hinder such implementation. The key future challenge is not only a legal nature, but a challenge for setting up an institute for employee participation in decision-making in the existing framework for legal and cultural industrial relations. In the future, it is necessary to work with the trade unions in relation to this issue, to define their role in the expected future state and to consensus redefine the role of trade unions if they are deemed necessary and to distinguish the role of trade unions and workers’ councils in the future.
The activities of the WIM3 project will be transferred from general information to concrete. Namely, the experiment will be implemented in the pilot companies (implementation of the draft laws for inclusion of the employees based on the WIM2 “Participation of workers in the Law on Management”). This will add value and introduce the real benefits of employees’ participation in decision-making processes. The activities and results will apply to all relevant stakeholders – governments, employers and trade unions, not only in the countries where the experiment will be conducted (Macedonia, Montenegro), but also in other EU candidates and potential candidates.