Employee Representation Bodies in the Private Sector in Switzerland

Employee representation bodies elected by the workforce (often called "works councils", the official German term used by Swiss law is "Arbeitnehmervertretung" / ANV) exist in Private Sector companies in Switzerland since the end of the 19th century. In the beginning they were an instrument of entrepreneurial strategies to offer an "alternative" to employee interest representation through trade unions. In the manufacturing industries, they are widespread since the end of World War II; their competencies are regulated on the one hand in collective agreements (Gesamtarbeitsverträge / GAV), on the other hand in a number of federal acts. Since 1993, ANV are also regulated as institutions in a separate framework act, the Federal Workers' Participation Act (Mitwirkungsgesetz). In establishments with more than 50 employees, the workforce has the right to demand the election of an employee representation body.
The workplace as a an arena of industrial relations has gained increased significance in the last decades - also in Switzerland. This is, for instance, reflected in the tendency in the 1990s to shift yearly collective wage bargaining from industry level down to company or establishment level in a number of GAV.
As a consequence of the sudden revaluation of the Swiss Franc in January 2015, many companies in the metalworking sector are currently trying to apply the so-called Crisis Article in the GAV which allows a temporary increase in the weekly working hours, given the consent of the ANV. This development provides far reaching challenges for these employee representation bodies.
There has been so far no systematic information about the incidence of ANV in the Private Sector in Switzerland, their functions and potential changes in their actual practices over the last 20 years available - neither from social science, nor from authorities or social partners' associations. This three-years research project aimed at closing these knowledge gaps. First, we looked into the quantitative incidence of ANV in the private economy, from sector to sector. For selected industries in the manufacturing as well as in the service sector, forms and functions of ANV had been compared in detail. Eventually, a number of case studies gave insight into the practices of this institution acting in the field of force between workforce, management and trade unions.

The project sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation had been running from September 2015 until August 2018.

Project director
Prof. Dr. Patrick Ziltener, University of Zurich

Researcher
lic. phil. Heinz Gabathuler, Tel. +41 44 242 38 10
gabathuler.heinz [at] gmail.com

Patrick Ziltener / Heinz Gabathuler (2019): Employee Participation in Practice: Works Councils in the Tissue of Social Partnership in Switzerland. Swiss Journal of Sociology, 2 / 2019: 215-235 (in German)
https://seismoverlag.ch/site/assets/files/3595/oa_szfs_45_2.pdf

Patrick Ziltener / Heinz Gabathuler (2018): Working more in order to preserve jobs? Works councils in the Swiss mechanical and electrical engineering industry and the ‘Swiss franc shock’ in 2015. Industrial Relations Journal 49 (5-6): 534-553 (DOI: 10.1111/irj.12236)

Patrick Ziltener / Heinz Gabathuler (2018): Workplace-level employee participation in Switzerland - an inquiry of provisions in collective agreements. Industrielle Beziehungen 25(1): 5-26 (in German)
(DOI: 10.3224/indbez.v25i1.01)
Betriebliche Mitwirkung in der Schweiz (in German)

Heinz Gabathuler / Patrick Ziltener (2018): Arbeitszeitverlängerungen nach dem Frankenschock. Die Volkswirtschaft 8-9: 50-53

Arbeitszeitverlängerungen nach dem Frankenschock (German version)

L’allongement du temps de travail en entreprise après le choc du franc fort (French version)

In June 2018, Heinz Gabathuler presented a summary of research results on specific aspects of employee participation in the private sector in Switzerland at a co-determination conference organised by the Hans Böckler Stiftung at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin:

Employee participation in a voluntarist and non-adversarial context: The Swiss experience

Heinz Gabathuler was co-organiser of a workshop ("Democracy does not end at the workplace") at the congress "Reclaim Democracy" which took place at the University of Basel in February 2017. He gave an overview on the legal situation of workers' participation in Switzerland, the history of workplace level social dialogue, and presented some results from his ongoing research:

Workshop documentation "Demokratie endet nicht am Arbeitsplatz" (in German)

An overview on the role of employee representations / works councils within the Swiss industrial relations system had been presented at the European Regional Congress of the International Labour and Employment Relations Association (ILERA) in September 2016 in Milano.

Works councils in a voluntaristic context: the Swiss case

The newsmagazine of the Swiss trade union Syndicom published an interview with Heinz Gabathuler in its March 2017 issue:

Interview ANV Syndicom-Zeitung (German version) (PDF, 92 KB)

Interview ANV Syndicom-Zeitung (French version) (PDF, 93 KB)

Interview ANV Syndicom-Zeitung (Italian version) (PDF, 79 KB)