The Employee Involvement Directive 2001/86/EC is an EU Directive concerning the right of workers to elect members of the board of directors in a European Company. It is a supplement to the European Company Regulation and inspired by the European Works Council Directive. History The Directive is largely modeled after the European Works Council Directive 94/45/EC. Conversely, according to the European Economic and Social Committee, the updated EWC Recast Directive 2009/38/EC was inspired by the Employee Involvement Directive. Content EU member states differ in the degree of worker involvement in corporate management. In Germany, most large corporations are required to allow employees to elect a certain percentage of seats on the supervisory board. Other member states, have no such requirement, and furthermore in these states such practices are largely unknown and considered a threat to the rights of management. These differing traditions of worker involvement have held back the adoption of the Statute for a European Company Regulation 2001 for over a decade. States without worker involvement provisions were afraid that the European Company ("Societas Europaea" - SE) regulation might lead to having such provisions being imposed on their companies; and states with those provisions were afraid they might lead to those provisions being circumvented. A compromise, contained in the Directive, was worked out as follows: worker involvement provisions in the SE will be decided upon by negotiations between employees and management before the creation of the SE. If agreement cannot be reached, provisions contained in the Directive will apply. The Directive provides for worker involvement in the SE if a minimum percentage of employees from the entities coming together to form the SE enjoyed worker involvement provisions. The Directive permits Member States to not implement these default worker involvement provisions in their national law, but then an SE cannot be created in that member state if the provisions in the Directive would apply and negotiations between workers and management are unsuccessful. Definition Definition of employee participation: it does not mean participation in day-to-day decisions, which are a matter for the management, but participation in the supervision and strategic development of the company. Participation If the two parties do not reach a satisfactory arrangement, a set of standard principles set out in the Annex to the Directive becomes applicable. Several models of participation are possible: firstly, a model in which the employees form part of the supervisory board or of