Transnational Company Agreements in Europe: COLBAR Research Report

Abstract

Transnational Company Agreements (TCAs), also called International Framework Agreements (IFAs), are concluded with Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) and are covering their activities in several countries. The first TCA took off in 1988, when the Danone International Framework Agreement was concluded. Drivers on the management side stemmed from the growing public pressure for MNEs to comply with corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards and to manage their relationship with civil society more carefully.

This report addresses COLBAR-EUROPE’s Research Objective 4) Do agreements converge across countries when concluded by subsidiaries of multinational companies and do they align with TCAs? For the analyses we first described the contents of the 40 TCAs, by January 2021 available in the WageIndicator CBA Database. Next, we identified several corresponding national CBAs in this Database with 602 CBAs from 28 countries in Europe.

For the alignment between TCAs and CBAs we could compare three companies IKEA, FORD Motor Company and Siemens. In all companies, the TCA included substantially fewer topics than the CBAs did (approx 40%).