Does Our Company Need a European Works Council? Thresholds, Triggers, and the 2028 Question
It is one of the most common questions in European employee relations, and it is usually asked at the wrong moment — after a request has landed, or mid-restructuring, when a union federation raises it. The answer has three layers: whether your company is in scope of the European Works Council framework, whether anything obliges you to act right now, and what the revised directive does to that calculation between now and 2028. This guide works through all three.
The thresholds: are you in scope?
The EWC framework applies to "Community-scale" undertakings and groups. The test, unchanged in substance since 1994 and carried forward by the recast, is headcount in the European Economic Area:
A Community-scale undertaking has at least 1,000 employees within the member states, and at least 150 employees in each of at least two member states. A Community-scale group meets the same numbers at group level: 1,000+ employees across the member states, with at least two group undertakings in different member states each employing 150 or more. Employee numbers are assessed on the average over the previous two years, and national transposition laws govern exactly who counts as an employee in each country — part-time workers, agency workers, and apprentices are treated differently across jurisdictions, which matters for companies near the line.
Two boundary notes. First, the geography is the EEA — EU member states plus Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein. Second, since Brexit, UK employees no longer count towards the thresholds, and the UK does not host EWC obligations for new requests — many groups that were anchored in the UK moved their arrangements to an EU member state's law. A group with 900 EEA employees and 5,000 in the UK is not in scope; a group with 1,100 employees spread across Germany, France, and Poland almost certainly is. Our country landscape guides cover how the national building blocks differ.
In scope is not the same as obliged to act
Being a Community-scale undertaking does not, by itself, force you to establish an EWC. The obligation to start the process arises in one of two ways: on request — a written request from at least 100 employees, or their representatives, drawn from at least two undertakings or establishments in at least two different member states — or on management's own initiative, which is less common but strategically underrated.
Once a valid request exists, central management must set up a Special Negotiating Body (SNB): employee representatives from every member state where the company has staff, elected or appointed under each country's national rules. The SNB and management then negotiate the EWC agreement — scope, composition, competences, meeting frequency, resources. The directive allows up to three years for negotiation. If management refuses to open negotiations within six months of a valid request, or three years pass without agreement, the directive's subsidiary requirements apply automatically: a default, statutory EWC whose design the company had no hand in. The subsidiary requirements are, by construction, the outcome a well-advised employer negotiates to avoid.
In practice, the whole journey — request, SNB constitution, negotiation, first meeting — routinely takes 18 to 36 months. That number should anchor every planning conversation about EWCs, because it means the decision-relevant date is never the deadline; it is the deadline minus two years.
How the recast directive changes the calculation
Directive (EU) 2025/2450, in force since 31 December 2025 and due for transposition by 1 January 2028, does not change the thresholds. It changes the consequences of being in scope — in ways that push in one direction: more requests, sooner.
First, the recast ends the historical exemptions for pre-1996 and 2009-window voluntary agreements from 2 January 2028, bringing several hundred long-exempt multinationals into the framework at once — we cover that cohort in detail in our guide to Article 14 agreements. Second, it strengthens what an EWC gets: a broader definition of transnational matters, reasoned written responses to opinions before decisions are implemented, employer-funded experts and training, and national penalties with teeth. A stronger institution is a more attractive one to request. Third, the legislative attention itself — trade union federations across Europe have been running campaigns mapping in-scope companies without EWCs. If your company is in scope and EWC-less, the probability of a request arriving is rising, not falling.
For the full timeline and per-country transposition status, Graylark maintains an EWC recast employer guide and transposition tracker, reviewed monthly.
Should you wait for a request — or move first?
The default posture in many boardrooms is to wait: no request, no EWC, no cost. That posture has a real but narrowing logic. What it misses is that the party who moves first shapes the process. An employer that initiates engagement chooses the moment — outside a restructuring, not during one. It arrives with a proposed structure rather than reacting to one. It builds the employee-side relationship before the first contentious consultation, which is when the relationship's quality gets tested. And it avoids negotiating under the shadow of the subsidiary requirements with a deadline it does not control.
There are honest reasons to wait — genuine doubt about scope, imminent divestment of European operations, an employee population with no appetite for transnational representation. But "we would rather not think about it" is not one of them, and after 2028 the cost of unpreparedness goes up: penalties for non-compliance become dissuasive by design, and the recast's procedural standards apply to everyone in the framework.
A short diagnostic
1. Compute EEA headcount — total and per member state, averaged over two years, under national counting rules. If you are above 1,000/150-in-two, you are in scope. 2. If you are in scope with no EWC: assess request likelihood (union density, works council activity, restructuring pipeline) and decide, deliberately, between preparing for a request and initiating engagement. Either way, prepare: know your representative landscape, your data flows, and who would sit on an SNB. 3. If you have a voluntary pre-1996 or 2009-window agreement: read the Article 14 analysis — your timeline is the shortest of anyone's. 4. If you already have an EWC: your question is not scope but standards — whether your information, consultation, and response processes will withstand the recast's requirements from 2029.
Whichever cohort you are in, the operational requirement converges: knowing who represents whom across countries, running information and consultation to defensible timelines, and being able to evidence the process afterwards. That is a management discipline — and it is the discipline Graylark's European Works Council software is built to run.
See Graylark's EWC management platform