It has long been acknowledged that employment relations are redolent of power, with individuals necessarily becoming subject to and dependent upon their employers.Footnote ¹ This asymmetry has led scholars to note that the human rights of employees may be one of the areas of interest to business and human rights scholarship.Footnote ² Indeed, in a most elementary sense, businesses may violate rights individuals have as employees, such as the right to be remunerated for their work. Additionally, employers may have an impact on the rights one enjoys as a human being, irrespective of their employment, such as freedom from discrimination. In the broadest sense, one may argue that businesses have a detrimental impact on human rights when they do not involve their employees in decision-making processes related to managing the business. Grouped under themes such as ‘workplace democracy’,Footnote ³ ‘employee involvement’,Footnote ⁴ or, most broadly, ‘employee voice’, literature touching upon this matter covers a range of disciplinary perspectives.Footnote ⁵ At its core, however, is an investigation of how one does and should construct the role of an employee in constituting the workplace.

Sára Hungler’s tightly packed book is an intervention of a legal scholar in this broader theme of employee voice. Her work situates human rights discourse in structures that allow employees to voice their views on the direction the company should be taking and to participate in relevant decision-making processes. She argues that employee involvement in this sense should ‘be treated as a universal right of all workers employed by Europe-based multinational corporations’, rather than remaining ‘a privilege of European citizens’.Footnote ⁶ In doing so, Hungler juxtaposes employee involvement as a human right to employee involvement as a prudential matter introduced to increase competitiveness, imagining both as the ‘dual nature’ of the employee’s voice. She then places these two faces of employee involvement against relevant and mostly supranational sources of law, demonstrating how they are and may be put to work.

As Hungler advocates the dominance of human rights register in regulating employee involvement, her work has normative underpinnings. She argues that furthering employee involvement, in addition to enabling the dignity of each employee, may be desirable in a consequentialist sense, as it is expected to advance the effectiveness of a company.Footnote ⁷ Nevertheless, the majority of the book is a descriptive account of how existing law in large part fails to further these desiderata. Some restrictions of employee involvement presumably stem from the dominant economic imperative that does not translate into a right necessarily concordant with employees’ inclusion. Other difficulties are tied in with differentiated national regimes of employee involvement in the age of a globalized economy, which makes devising a universally applicable framework of employee involvement substantially more difficult.Footnote ⁸ Hungler in this respect pays attention to two directives of the European Union, Directive 2002/14/ECFootnote ⁹ and Directive 2009/38/EC,Footnote ¹⁰ made particularly relevant by the Union’s orientation towards its social model and socio-economic rights included in its Charter of Fundamental Rights. Nevertheless, Hungler demonstrates that both directives suffer from a number of shortcomings, such as their vagueness, which may lead to an implementation that is less than ideal. A case study on Hungary, contained in the penultimate chapter of the book, brings this message home. It depicts a framework for employee participation that at face value may appear to be a fair approximation of an ideal, while in reality failing to ensure meaningful worker involvement at all levels.

In addition to the introductory and concluding chapters, Hungler develops her argument in four steps. After a chapter devoted to the dual nature of employee involvement, she provides a detailed overview of the regulatory model established in European law. Here she introduces the directive on the general framework for informing and consulting employees, as well as the directive on European Works Council. The next chapter then juxtaposes this model to relevant but essentially non-binding international standards, namely those of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In addition, Hungler in this chapter examines the global potential of standards enshrined in European Union law. This chapter contains some prescriptive suggestions for applying European law beyond the boundaries of the Union, thus bringing employee involvement closer to a universal ideal.Footnote ¹¹ Finally, the last substantive chapter turns to difficulties in implementation of the European employee involvement model in the context of the ongoing economic crisis, describing in some detail the pitfalls that were made manifest when employee involvement was adopted by Hungarian authorities.

Hungler leaves us with the realization that employee involvement remains strongly affected by company policiesFootnote ¹² and that, in the face of vagueness and possible unenforcability of supranational standards, individual states are to be expected to provide more substance to employee involvement as a fundamental right.Footnote ¹³ Her findings, particularly her chapter on Hungary, confirm that the Weimar era theory of the economic constitution, adopted as Hungler’s normative benchmark, may serve us better in identifying ‘the interdependence between legal norms and social power’ than as a basis for normative arguments.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, while the tenor of Hungler’s thesis is normative, her book is more of a map of areas that will require further normative and prescriptive research. Such a book will undoubtedly be of interest to scholars researching the intricacies of employee voice in the contemporary globalized economy.