Election of employee representatives postponed for a year?

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Elections in Belgian companies for works councils and workplace health and safety committees are likely to be postponed from 1999 until 2000, at the employers' request. The elections involve half the workers in the private sector.

It emerged in May 1998 that the elections of private sector employees' representatives on works council s and workplace health and safety committee s, planned for May 1999, have probably been put off for a year, by decision of the Minister of Employment and Labour. This decision has still to be put into law, however. The workplace elections are normally held every four years, with the most recent round having occurred in 1995.

The postponement request came from the Federation of Belgian Enterprises (Fédération des Entreprises de Belgique/Verbond van Belgische Ondernemingen, FEB/VBO). For some months, the Federation had wanted this postponement out of fear that there would be no dispassionate debate if workplace elections coincided with the 1999 national general elections. It also invoked organisational difficulties for enterprises, which in 1999 will be facing the computer problems associated with 2000, as well as the introduction of the euro single currency. Above all, however, employers feared that an electoral campaign in which the main tarde unions confronted each other would cause tension in the sectoral bargaining planned for 1999.

The trade unions have opposed this postponement, rejecting the employers' arguments and arguing for urgency. According to them, a large number of the worker representative bodies elected in 1995 have been reduced by restructuring and early retirement, and new enterprises still have no representation. The argument of a clash with sectoral bargaining is unfounded, they say, as these talks start in the autumn of 1998 and will be practically over by May 1999. As for the general election, it has been noted in the past that political elections follow a logic very different from that of the "social" elections.

In both 1991 and 1995, the social elections involved about 1.2 million people, or half the employees in the private sector. They are held only in firms with more than 50 employees in the case of the workplace health and safety committees and only in those with more than 100 employees in the case of work councils. As small and medium-sized enterprises (SME s) are not obliged to hold elections, some employers are thought to avoid coverage by deliberately restricting the number of their employees or setting up different legal entities within the same company through subsidiaries or externalisation. Moreover, according to a study of 1991 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven ("Zwijgen is fout, ik stem ! Vergelijkende analyse sociale verkiezingen 1987-91", H Dejonckheere, Steunpunt Werkgelegenheid Arbeid Vorming - KU-Leuven, Dossier Nr 2 (1997)), between 20% and 23% of the workers on electoral lists did not vote, as a significant number of firms did not organise the elections as they ought to have done.

To answer some of the trade unions' criticisms, the Minister of Employment and Labour, Miet Smet, plans to allow employee representatives sitting on one type of joint representative body to sit on another if the number of elected representatives in the latter have dropped or if one of the trade unions is no longer represented. Criteria to define subsidiaries will also be tightened up in order to limit the "company engineering" used to escape the obligation to set up representative bodies. Further consultation on these issues with the bipartite National Labour Council (Conseil National du Travail/National Arbeidsraad) is planned, but the recurrent problem of employees' representation in undertakings with fewer than 50 employees has not yet been settled.

References

"Les relations collectives du travail en Belgique. Acteurs et institutions", E Krzeslo, Dossier TEF - ULB n°16 (1996).

"Les élections sociales", P Blaise, L'Année Sociale (1995).