CHAPTER 7. Up-to-date applicable rules

The articulation of the various sources that make up the regulatory skeleton of EWCs is almost inevitably the starting point for any approach to these bodies.

This structuring is generally based on the concurrence and intercommunication of three levels of regulation.

Specifically, the European Works Council figure is structured on the interrelation of Community regulations and internal transposition rules, with collective autonomy.

At the Community level, Council Directive 94/45/EC of 22 September 1994 on the establishment of a European Works Council or a procedure in Community-scale undertakings and Community-scale groups of undertakings for the purposes of informing and consulting employees is the original basic rule on the subject.

Its ultimate aim was to coordinate the establishment of a transnational information and consultation instrument, which required the joint and coordinated action of the various national transposition rules and collective autonomy.

It was the culmination of several years of discussion and regulatory attempts at the European level, to the point of being described as one of the greatest achievements of European social policy.

The Directive was amended significantly: Council Directive 1997/74/EC of 15 December 1997, which extended its scope to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; Council Directive 2006/109/EC of 20 November 2006, which adapted the original legislation to take account of the accession of Bulgaria and Romania; and Directive 2009/38/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 May 2009, which amended and recast its content.

Although the latter Directive was to enter into force 20 days after its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union, most of its provisions entered into force on 6 June 2011 (Art. 18), when Directive 94/45/EC was definitively repealed (Art. 17).

By that date, the provisions constituting a substantive amendment to the previous Directives should have been transposed into national legislation (Recital 47 of the Preamble and Art. 16), as indeed occurred in Spain, as indicated below.

The special legal complexity of the European regulations, which derives from the aforementioned combination of transnational and national regulations (heteronomous and autonomous), was taken up at the domestic level in the EU countries, on information and consultation rights of employees in companies and groups of companies with a Community dimension, in compliance with the obligation to transpose the original European regulations on the matter into national law.