Information and Labour Rights

This article examines the question of employees’ right to business information. Significant attention has been devoted to employees’ participation rights, for instance on grounds of justice. In this context, access to information appears, often implicitly, as a by-product of employees’ participation rights. If entitled to participate, employees should be able to access all information required for relevant participation and decision-making. In this article, I examine the question of employees’ access to information as a question in its own right. I examine this question in light of various normative requirements: efficiency, autonomy and equality. I suggest in particular that the normative requirement of efficiency would call for more information than what is currently made available to employees in various countries, both on hiring and in employment: a full access to strategic and management information. If one resists this perspective, employees should be granted compensatory labour rights: firms’ funded severance pay as well as representation rights close to those of the German co-determination system.