Documents Boni, Guido 4 results

"Transnational collective bargaining (TCB) has become a ‘hot' topic of European industrial relations. As well as collective bargaining between workers and employers conducted at the sectoral or national level, negotiations on employee rights and working conditions now also take place at the supranational level, within multinational companies. It is a development that poses major challenges for trade unions, as well as for employers and lawmakers. This book takes stock of the particular challenges faced by trade union representatives, works councils and employer organisations; it reviews the existing literature on this topic and examines contrasting views of the prospects for subsequent development of this new practice; it also offers some practical suggestions for policymakers who find themselves having to deal with this new component of the Europeanisation of industrial relations.
One of the key questions tackled in the book is whether a regulatory framework for TCB is feasible, necessary and/or useful. Perhaps even more importantly: can we, given the proliferation of instances of TCB, actually manage without such a legal system, and what should be the main elements of such a framework? By providing a better understanding and a critical analysis of the emergence and development of transnational collective bargaining, the authors of this book offer valuable help to trade unionists and practitioners in preparing for – and being prepared for – this next stage in the internationalisation of industrial relations."

"A mainstream view of the rule of the law has denied for a long time that social rights are “real” rights. Referred to as “the rights of the poor”, Social and Economic Rights have been often thought as “poor rights”. Lawyers and judges often distinguish between social and civil rights, albeit human rights have been affirmed, since 1948, to be indivisible and interdependent. The distinction between civic and political rights on the one hand, and economic and social rights, on the other hand, often results in casting aside the social rights and prevent them from being justiciable. However, the academic debate about judicial enforcement of social rights is undergoing changes. The divide between the fundamental rights tends to be questioned by social movements which do not hesitate anymore to take legal actions and claim those social rights (the right to housing, to food, to health care…), as well as by a number of academic researchers who try to rethink the universality and indivisibility of human rights. That trend is followed by judges, international ones as well as national ones, who help with such decisions to strengthen the justiciability, effectiveness and opposability of social rights. The subject of the following contributions is this current trend of justiciability and enforcement of social rights in Europe. This working paper draws attention to and scrutinize the academic debate and the jurisdictional answers concerning the nature and regime of social rights through the use of comparative and international law. Rights are studied in UK (W. Baugniet), Belarus, Ukraine and Russia (U. Belavusau), Spain (M. E. Blas López), Italy, (G. Boni), Germany and Switzerland (C. Fercot), Norway & Scandinavia (T. Harbo), Poland (A.M. Jaron'), Portugal (B. Mestre) and the European Convention of Human Rights (C. Marzo). The Varieties of Social Rights in Europe is evident and reading the following pages will give an impressive example of the diversity of European legal systems."

"Rapidly changing markets in the context of globalization call for increasingly frequent restructuring to sustain the competitiveness of individual firms. To meet this need while minimizing consequent job loss, the social partners in major European countries have devised a variety of decentralization mechanisms that enhance locallevel flexibility without fundamentally calling into question the traditional national models of collective bargaining. Analysing the use of “opening clauses” in German industry agreements, France's firm-level “derogation agreements” and mandatory bargaining on “workforce planning”‚ and Italy's tripartite “territorial agreements”‚ the author concludes with a plea for a supranational framework to support socially sensitive restructuring across Europe."