Employees' participation, involvement and collective bargaining; comparative thoughts in search for a common european denominator

The essay is a comparative analysis on the issue of employees’ participation in the enterprise and its variations with respect to the rights of union involvement. The legal systems being compared are the sort supranational European Union and those of Germany, France, Spain, Italy; the first two Countries are those in which the experience of employees’ participation has a greater tradition, while the second two are those in which the debate on legislation on participation is more relevant and takes place just looking at the German tradition and, in part, to the French one. The Author highlights the inadequacy of the technical regulations, and of the consequent results, of Communitarian law when guided by s.c. “upward harmonization” (particularly towards the German model) and, instead, increased utility of a more recent legislative approach that takes into account founding national specificities (primarily the constitutional principles about systems of representation and collective bargaining) and that seek a common denominator of those in which each national legislature may recognize in pursuing the implementation of a discipline on participation. Flipping through " wires" and " nodes" of participation in the various jurisdictions, emerges from the essay , that the declination of the relationship between the right to collective bargaining and the factual reality , you cannot suffer a priori assumption that it could be better to leave the rule of collective representation only to the balance of power between unions. The choice of themes , tools and , above all, the interlocutors becomes an essential moment in the creation of a discipline on the involvement of workers in the undertaking and should be entrusted to the rationality of the law that represents the true choice to the assumption of responsibility for the acts that this entails.