Dr. Werner Altmeyer:

I thank the committee for the invitation. I watched the discussions in the committee last year in June with great interest. I will speak slowly because I am not a native speaker. I will briefly introduce myself. I have been working with EWCs full time for 25 years and wrote my doctoral thesis on the subject. For ten years, I have been the managing director of the EWC Academy in Hamburg, Germany, which is a private limited company providing training, conferences and consultancy services for employee representatives, as well as a quarterly bulletin on EWC issues in three languages. We have no official connection with trade unions but all our consultants have professional experience in trade union-related institutions or as members of works councils. We have worked with larger EWCs such as Airbus, Unilever and Zurich Insurance but mostly work with smaller councils representing up to 20,000 workers in Europe in the electrical, automotive, pharmaceutical, packaging, finance, transport and IT sectors in a variety of jurisdictions.

This includes USA companies that were already operating under Irish law before Brexit, or Bombardier, a Canadian business jet manufacturer with a European works council, EWC, based near Belfast Airport under the law of Northern Ireland at the time. We are currently owrking with the Verizon EWC under Irish law.

I will give some EWC figures as examples. According to the database of the European Trade Union Institute in Brussels there are currently some 1,200 EWCs, more than 500 of them with Irish delegates. Unfortunately, one cannot find reliable statistics on post-Brexit changes. I estimate that Ireland now ranks third in the EU in terms of the number of companies under the respective law. Germany hosts nearly 25% of all European works councils, France 15% to 20%, and Ireland 12% to 15%. I do not know the exact figure - it may be 140 to 180 companies - but only 11 of those are proper Irish companies like Smurfit Kappa, Kerry Group or Aer Lingus. One can identify the names when looking at the online database. No. 4 is Sweden with less than 6%. Many EU member states have only a handful of EWCs or none at all.

On whether multinational companies can choose the country in which the EWC is based, any company with global headquarters in an EU member state must locate the EWC there. Companies from third countries such as the USA, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, and the UK after Brexit, are free to choose the national law, the location and a legal entity, which is called the representative agent.

On whether a company must have many employees in a particular country to locate the EWC there, the answer is "No". It is possible to choose Irish law without having a single employee in Ireland, without having an office space in Ireland and without paying one euro of tax in Ireland. There are examples like this from Luxembourg. I personally know a company that has thousands of employees in Europe but only 29 in Ireland and the EWC has been based in Ireland. Consequently, there is no automatic link and maybe no impact at all with the labour market at the seat of the EWC. Do EWCs in Ireland have to hold their meetings in Ireland? The answer is "No". Meetings can take place anywhere; in Paris, in Brussels, in Berlin or in Bucharest. Last year I even attended meetings in Switzerland and England. Meetings might never take place on Irish soil, and that is legally fine.

National law only has meaning when it comes to legal disputes. I shall outline what legal disputes might arise. In practice, conflicts repeatedly arise over the functioning or the operation of the EWC; the competence of the EWC in transnational issues; the scope of information and consultation during a restructuring process; the extent of the reporting obligation on business data; and confidentiality. However, the overall number of court cases is not very high. I will outline some practical examples of what might come up in court disputes. The first example is that EWC members may have training needs and central management does not want to pay for it.

A complaint then has to be made to the Workplace Relations Commission in Ireland. The Workplace Relations Commission requires each side to bear its own costs. What does this mean for a workers’ representative from Bulgaria or Portugal, for example, with no legal training or proper understanding of the procedure? Who pays for the interpreter and, if no remote hearing is arranged, for flight, hotel and meals? The company, however, has access to leading firms of solicitors and eminent barristers, the cost of engaging whom can be written off against tax.

Another example is a US company that wants to close sites in Spain and refuses to involve the EWC. Such a court dispute has actually taken place, once in Germany and another case in the Netherlands. In such cases the EWC has to act quickly and needs a short-term and enforceable decision from a court. Does Irish law provide for this? I have some doubts.

A third example is when one side wins a case in the Workplace Relations Commission or Labour Court and the other side can appeal, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court. Who pays solicitors and barristers for the EWC? If the EWC loses, costs of over €100,000 may be incurred. Will the EWC chair, lets us say from Slovenia, then have to sell his or her private home to pay the company’s solicitor and barrister in Ireland? Even if central management ends up being ordered to pay all the EWC’s legal fees, that can take years. What lawyer in Ireland is willing to take such a risk and wait years for payment?

These three examples show that it is not just about a small detail of EWC law, but about the principle of the rule of law as such. If a law is valid, framework conditions must be implemented so that all parties involved can enforce the law in court. The party in EWC disputes is not an individual workers’ representative, but the council as a collective body without having its own budget.