WORKERS COUNCILS FACED WITH COLLECTIVE REDUNDANCY - 3 LEVELS OF DEBATE

Jurisprudence on redundancy schemes is used as a means to put forward a plurality of action models for workers' councils. Jurisprudence is t o be understood as a series of decisions on a law which has been publi shed in specialized legal journals. Lexical analysis of the corpus of judicial decisions for redundancy schemes developed in this way, bring s out a series of levels of debate belonging to three typical action m odels for workers' councils depending on the economic situation involv ed. The first model is one of resistance to thr strategy of competitiv ity supposed by the job elimination project, envisaged by management. The second model corresponds to a widening of the way opened by employ ment policies, based on the social measures which accompany economic r estructuration. The last model, using economic players, is a means to discover and delve deeper into the assets resulting from the singulari ty of the economic activity of the firm. Following the law voted in Ja nuary 1993, jurisprudence has taken three different directions, meanin g that the distinction between economic and employment policy is bring questioned and more attention paid to the possible impact of legal me asures on the direction in which firms develop.