Union representation of employees in collective bargaining within the company was long time dominant in European systems. However, this model became insufficient mostly because the decrease of unionization, as the growing number of non-unionized employees is deprived of the possibility to conduct collective bargaining and industrial collective actions.
Although the Romanian law does not confine the possibility of representing the employees to trade unions only, in reality most of the collective labor contracts at company level are negotiated by them. Moreover, although in Romania the non-unionized strikes are generally allowed by the law, such collective actions rarely really took place in Romania, unlike in other systems of European law. The paper will try to find the reasons for this situation and to identify the advantages and disadvantages of a larger involvement of the non-unionized employees in the industrial actions.
The purpose of the paper is to emphasize the place of the Romanian regulation in the field of non-organized collective actions within the major European systems. The analyze will lead to several de lege ferenda proposals, regarding the future possibilities of non-organized employees to exercise their collective rights, especially the right to collective bargain and to participate into collective actions.
The paper will use mostly the comparative method of research, but also an empirical analyze of the field. This approach will hopefully allow us to go deeper in a search for an answer to the general question: who is the employer’s partner in a broadly understood dialogue concerning conditions and terms of employment within the company?