ETUI project: Fitness Checking the Information and Consultation of Workers (ICW) Directives

Other directives dealing with worker information and consultation like the 2009 recast EWC Directive or the 2001 SE Directive are deliberately excluded. The Commission plans to analyse the three directives in order to identify ‘potential benefits and costs’. With a view to promoting coherence between all directives in the areas of information and consultation, it will also ‘examine the option of a recast’. However, since what is at issue is information and consultation of workers generally (Directive 2002/14/EC) and in two specific cases (transfer and collective redundancies), the question arises why other directives on information and consultation should be outside the exercise if its real purpose is to ‘ensure the quality of legislation’? Serious concerns have already been expressed about the impact of such initiatives on workers’ rights in terms of lowering core labour standards (Vogel, 2009 with regard to health and safety at the workplace). The current ETUI research project questions the whole fitness check exercise and especially the method used to assemble a programme of evidence to assess the selected three ICW Directives. The assessment will take in the social and economic costs and benefits of the ICW Directives at national level in both quantitative and qualitative terms - a method arguably inappropriate for social and labour legislation. The relevance of selecting these three Directives in terms of coherence with a broader group of EU labour law acts dealing with IWC is also under examination.