All the union news that's fit to blog...
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…
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB JA X-NONE …Read more…
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…
Just a quick plus for UNI and their excellent work exposing poor labour practices at Spanish-listed security firm Prosegur. The company is about to carry out a partial float of its cash-in-transit business, which makes this a very timely issue for inve…Read more…
I realised recently that I’ve just completed a decade of blogging. Although the arrival of two kids means I blog a lot less often than I used to, and read a lot less to blog about, I still feel the urge to communicate. Partly I just enjoy writing, but …Read more…
The LSE has produced guidance on company reporting on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. So I searched it for references to various issues. Guess what? Like most RI/ESG initiatives, labour issues get very little attention.
I’ve blogged a bit recently about what appears to be a significant shift in thinking about corporate governance. There are signs all over the place that faith in shareholder primacy is faltering. There have been plenty of think pieces on this subject o…Read more…
There was a fascinating piece in The Times a couple of days ago about asset managers threatening to get tough on executive pay. You know, the news story that now appears before every AGM season, quite often accompanied by claims this could be the “stor…Read more…
1. Explicitly remove shareholder primacy from the UK system. This should be argued on the basis that it hasn’t worked, the shareholder base has changed too much to make the model work for the public (shareholders now primarily split between the City – …Read more…
As I blogged previously, the commentariat was united last week in its certainty that Jeremy Corbyn was talking rubbish when he proposed some pretty tough positions on executive pay.
Amazingly, it turns out the the public favours taking a very tough li…Read more…