Trade Unions in the EU Facing Global Companies: Legal Obstacles and Innovations

摘要

In the European Union, a set of legal instruments was developed to enhance socialpartners’ actions. Here, we consider whether these instruments encourage, atCommunity level, efficient trade union actions in response to the strategies deployed bymultinational firms at international level.In the first part, this paper synthetically illustrates that, despite these positivedevelopments, some considerable legal obstacles remain in the European Union. Incontrast, the second part presents some interesting and innovative experiences. Aprecise evaluation of their results is still difficult to make, because they are related toemerging legal norms whose appropriation by social partners is still in its early stages.