All the union news that's fit to blog...
Today is Fat Cat Day, the day on which the High Pay Centre calculates that the average FTSE100 CEO has “earned” as much as someone on average earnings gets in a year.
As we’re focused on exec pay, I thought I’d contribute an update to a blog I wrote …Read more…
So, Labour is back in the game of public ownership. Various targets are now talked about for potential nationalisation, or something like it, including rail, the Royal Mail and utility companies. One of the interesting things about Labour’s discussion …Read more…
I wrote a piece a few months ago (prior to the election) saying that I thought that while the Left were unlikely to win the election, we were winning the battle of ideas. I don’t actually think this was a particularly insightful or original take, but i…Read more…
News from the annual Committee on Workers’ Capital conference, which took place in Berlin this year:
Union investors serve notice on XPOTrade union investors meeting in Berlin today served notice on US-based logistics provider XPO that it must reform …Read more…
Today saw a highly important by the ECJ relating to low-cost airline Ryanair. As many people will know* Ryanair is anti-union. It also relies on extensive use of indirect employment, with many cabin crew employed by agencies like Crewlink, whilst many …Read more…
Adolf Berle, of Berle and Means fame, continued to write interesting things about corporate power and control long after The Modern Corporation and Private Property. The excerpt below is from Power Without Property: A New Development in American Politi…Read more…
As anyone who reads this blog will probably be aware, the Conservative government bottled its commitment to put workers on boards. Instead it has asked the FRC to amend the UK Corporate Governance Code to give companies three options, one of which is a…Read more…
Today was the Sports Direct AGM and, once again, chairman Keith Hellawell was in the firing line. He had previously said he would stand down if he failed to get the support of a majority of independent shareholders.
Ahead of the AGM Unite has flagged …Read more…
I enjoyed this book recently. I won’t attempt to summarise any of it, but here are a couple of the many bits that I liked. May post up some more.
Bauman:
We are not predetermined. Nothing of what we do is inevitable and inescapable, lacking an alterna…Read more…
The excerpt below is from Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and plays into something I think a lot about today. To me it seems obvious that the Left had to shift towards a more expansive view of what people want than just what happens at work. In develop…Read more…
I’ve blogged before about the political problem that executive pay has become. The Conservative government’s latest attempt to both look tough and do little is to my mind more evidence of it. I can see no positives in the outcomes for the government, t…Read more…
I can’t overstate how much I like the report that the IPPR has just issued on corporate governance. I’ve been boring on for a while now about what I see as the end of the 1990s model of corporate governance for the UK. At the same time there has been s…Read more…
Next Group, the successor company to ICAP, just managed to publicly humiliate itself by spending company funds on political campaigns.
The company has its AGM next Wednesday and disclosed in the notice of meeting that it had spent £25,000 funding five Conservative Party candidates facing Liberal…Read more…
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I don’t read much political theory, but am very interested in Chantal Mouffe so recently bought this. Just started reading it last night and great to find that someone has properly theorised some issues where I’ve had my own half-baked thoughts. This s…Read more…
Once again, ahead of the UK AGM season we had the now traditional “boards braced for stormy AGM season” story. Anyone who follows this debate will know what I mean. We’ve all seen several times the claim that a second “shareholder spring” is coming as …Read more…
I’ve blogged about National Express a few times over the years, mainly in relation to its anti-union activity. But today a story in the FT about its executive pay arrangements caught my eye. I think it’s a great example of why performance-related …Read more…
The Committee on Workers’ Capital (CWC) has just published an important new document – the CWC Guidelines for the Evaluation of Workers’ Human Rights and Labour Standards.
Its the product of a couple of years’ work by a global group of trade union exp…Read more…
I’ve recently found something that captures important points relating to competing interests within the firm: this news story about American Airlines. More specifically, the quote from the analyst is almost perfect:
“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get…Read more…
I recently spent quite a bit of time trawling pension fund’s responsible investment policies to see what, if anything, they say about labour issues. The background to this is the long-expressed gripe that investors seem to spend less time looking at th…Read more…