Van Olmen & Wynant and the Belgian Institute of Company Lawyers (IBJ / IJE) organised an Employment Forum on the European Works Council at the Brussels office of AG Insurance. This interesting theme was already for a long time on the wishlist of the Employment Department, so at the invitation of mr. Christian Jammaers, who is legal counsel at AG Insurance and who represents the employees at the European Works Council of Ageas, it was a perfect opportunity to set up a seminar on this topic.
The forum had an attractive programme with first a short theoretic introduction by VOW partner Nicolas Simon, followed by presentations of and a discussion between our guest speakers:
- Geert Aelbrecht, Chief Human Resources Officer at Besix,
- Delphine Rudelli, Director of European and International Relations of the Union des Industries et Métiers de la Métallurgie (UIMM), which is an important employers organisation of the French Metal sector.
- Jan Franco, Internation Secretary of ACV Bouw - Industrie & Energie / CSC Bâtiment - Industrie & Energie
- Christian Jammaers, Employee representative of AG Insurance in the EWC of Ageas.
The four speakers all have a lot of experience with the actual functioning of one or more European works councils and shared their practical insights into the benefits and difficulties surrounding this important tool for European social dialogue at company level. All speakers were positivie about the added value and opportunities of an EWC but of course certain views were not shared, by example regarding the necessity of face-to-face meetings of the EWC members versus the alternative ways of meeting via videoconferences etc. One of the trickiest aspects of the EWC, is the issue of confidentiality of the information that is shared with the worker representatives in the EWC, which sometimes leads to trust-issues or to a lack of timely informing by the management. Our speakers gave some valuable tips, like creating smaller groups of trusted worker representatives which could receive sensitive information or to include clear definitions of the concerpt of confidentiality in the EWC-agreements, in order to make it clear for everyone which information is confidential, for who and for how long.
At the end of the seminar, the new secretary-general of IBJ-IJE, Julie Dutordoir, also addressed the audience.
