Workers’ Involvement in Management (WIM)

In line with the values ​​and needs of the EU in industrial relations, it is important to raise awareness of the importance of the role of employee representatives in companies not only in the EU Member States but also in countries that are at any stage of the EU accession. To this end, two projects have been successfully implemented in the past – “WIM: Employee Involvement for Better and Sustainable Management in Companies in Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia” and “WIM2: Employee Involvement – Direct to Challenges”. While the aim of the WIM project was to identify the current situation and existing legislation for employee involvement in enterprises (mainly) in the candidate countries, as well as to initiate activities to familiarize national social partners, bodies and actors at company level with the content of The EU Employee Involvement Act, the WIM2 project, focused on seeking concrete solutions or possible ways of transposing that part of the European legal order, which refers to employee participation in decision-making processes.

Project activities have shown that none of the EU participants has a legal framework for employee participation in companies. 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 worker participation in decision-making processes, as well as to identify challenges and mental barriers that may hinder such implementation. The key future challenge is not only legal in nature, but also the challenge of setting up an institute for employee participation in decision-making within the existing framework for legal and cultural industrial relations. In the future it is necessary to work with the unions on this issue, to define their role in the expected future state and to consensually redefine the role of the unions if deemed necessary and to distinguish the role of trade unions and workers’ councils in the future.

The activities of the WIM3 project were transferred from general informative to specific. Namely, with this part of the WIM series of projects, an experiment will be implemented in pilot companies (implementation of the draft laws for employee involvement based on the solutions from WIM2 “Participation of employees in the Law on Management”). This added value and introduced the real benefits of employee participation in decision-making processes. The activities and results concerned all relevant stakeholders – governments, employers and trade unions, not only in the countries where the experiment was conducted (Macedonia, Montenegro), but also in other EU candidates and potential candidates.

Partners in the series of WIM projects:

ZDS – Employer’s organization of Slovenia;

UPCG- Employer’s organization of Montenegro;

HUP  – Employer’s organization of Croatia;

БКМ – Business Confederation of Macedonia;

CPM – Participant management center;

BDA – Confederation of German’s employers organizations.

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