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On 11 March 2018, the two energy companies E.ON and RWE announced a restructuring of their activities. E.ON plans to focus itself on the electricity distribution grid and RWE on power generation. To this end, RWE is to sell its subsidiary innogy with 42,000 employees to E.ON and will acquire all renewable energies in return. RWE would then be the third largest green-energy producer in Europe. The transaction should be finalized by 2020.
Although 5,000 jobs are at stake, German trade unions have not rejected these plans, because potential foreign investors will be consequently kept at bay and the two groups will continue to exist with secured employee participation structures. A scenario such as in the merger of the gas manufacturers Linde and Praxair in June 2017 an be avoided. On 27 April 2018, E.ON presented the official takeover offer and the SE works council of innogy rendered its opinion on 9 May 2018. The management of E.ON, innogy and RWE, came to an agreement already on 11 May 2018 upon a Declaration of Principles with the works councils and trade unions. This includes a guarantee for no compulsory redundancies, the preservation of existing collective agreements and full-parity codetermination. However it applies only to Germany.
In the German energy industry there only remain European works councils in groups with a foreign parent company. The large companies once based in Germany have long since moved away into the European Company (SE) legal form. SE works councils and SE supervisory boards are consequently very common, also in individual subsidiaries here are however qualitative differences. As such, RWE belongs to the participation-friendly cases of SE agreements. innogy has a SE supervisory board with 20 members (including ten employee representatives), while E.ON had reduced the supervisory board from 20 to twelve members in the course of its SE conversion. According to the trade unions the acquisition of innogy should be reflected in the E.ON supervisory board.
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