European Works Councils as Risk Communities: The Case of General Motors

Abstract: The European works council (EWC) at General Motors is widely regarded as an outstanding example of cross-border trade union cooperation. This article reconstructs its development as a European trade union `risk community', which since the mid-1990s has faced unprecedented challenges to workers' interests as a result of intra-European competition for investment and GM's strategy of corporate globalization. To a limited extent, the EWC offered a European solution to local and national problems, but cross-border cooperation has remained fragile and issue-specific, and has implied a Eurocentric notion of trade union internationalism.