pp. 495-534

Jurisprudence on redundancy schemes is used as a means to put forward a plurality of action models for workers’ councils. Jurisprudence is to be understood as a series of decisions on a law which has been published in specialized legal journals. Lexical analysis of the corpus of judicial decisions for redundancy schemes developed in this way, brings out a series of levels of debate belonging to three typical action models for workers’ councils depending on the economic situation involved. The first model is one of resistance to the strategy of competitivity supposed by the job elimination project, envisaged by management. The second model corresponds to a widening of the way opened by employment policies, based on the social measures which accompany economic restructuration. The last model, using economic players, is a means to discover and delve deeper into the assets resulting from the singularity of the economic activity of the firm. Following the law voted in January 1993, jurisprudence has taken three different directions, meaning that the distinction between economic and employment policy is being questioned and more attention paid to the possible impact of legal measures on the direction in which firms develop.