[FR] Industrial relations in the European Union

SEMINAR REPORT BY JEAN-LOUIS ARNAUD

INTRODUCTION

Do you know the story of the hen who meets a pig and says to him, looking him straight in the eye: ‘Do you know that we could do great things together?’ “Ah,” said the pig, who hadn’t thought of that, “but what else? ‘Well,” said the hen, “ham and eggs, for example…” And the pig said “Yes”, and when he got home, he realised, but a little too late, that he was going to end up in slices.

This fable can serve as a lesson for any study of industrial relations. For Italian trade unionist Sergio d’Antoni, who proposed it at the Luxembourg seminar, the moral is clear: employers and trade unions can achieve great things together, but only if they accept give and take. Thirty experts in industrial relations – representatives of employers and trade unions, but also sociologists, political scientists, lawyers and politicians — took part in this seminar on 11 September, which addressed the evolution of industrial relations in European Union countries, at the invitation of the association ‘Notre Europe’, chaired by Jacques Delors, and the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies.