Trade unions in the EU facing global companies: legal obstacles and innovations

In the European Union, a set of legal instruments was developed to enhance social partners’ actions. Here, we consider whether these instruments encourage, at Community level, efficient trade union actions in response to the strategies deployed by multinational firms at international level. In the first part, this paper synthetically illustrates that, despite these positive developments, some considerable legal obstacles remain in the European Union. In contrast, the second part presents some interesting and innovative experiences. A precise evaluation of their results is still difficult to make, because they are related to emerging legal norms whose appropriation by social partners is still in its early stages.