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…
Internal logic versus external stupidity
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…
New guidelines for assessing company behaviour on labour issues
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…
Non-alignment of interests
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…
Pension funds and labour standards
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…
Prosegur IPO – potential investors should take note of labour risks
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…
A decade of blogging
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…
Where are the workers?
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.
Shifts in the UK corporate governance model
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…
Is this what asset managers really think about executive pay?
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…
A corporate governance agenda for the Left
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…
Public supports tough line on exec pay shocker
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…
Capping executive pay
It’s fair to say that today has not been an unblemished success for Labour. Nonetheless, despite everything, there is something encouraging in what Corbyn has been saying about executive pay.
First off, let’s tune out the noise. Much of the politico c…Read more…
ASOS exec pay in the spotlight
I blogged last month about the ASOS AGM results, which still puzzle me a little, but the big takeaway was a significant shareholder vote against the company’s remuneration report.
Well, today we can see there are good reasons for shareholders and othe…Read more…
Unrealised expectations of unintended consequences – Update
A few years back I started pulling together a list of reforms that were enacted despite dire warnings of unintended consequences. As Albert Hirschman (PBUH) pointed out, despite the focus of conservative/reactionary voices on uninte…Read more…
A few end of year thoughts
A few random thoughts that kept coming up during 2016…
It is not the case that different stakeholder interests within the firm necessarily align, even over the long term. As we learnt recently, for instance, some stakeholders will actively lobby aga…Read more…
ASOS AGM action!
This week saw some great campaigning by the GMB as part of their ongoing battle against poor working practices within ASOS, which has had a particular focus on the distribution centre in Barnsley run by XPO. The GMB had a “Catwalk of Shame” outside, an…Read more…
The forward march of shareholder oversight halted
I’m going to stop blogging about corporate governance reform for a bit, as I’m starting to bore myself as I keep ending back at the same place. But the endless discussion about executive pay has helped me crystallise a couple of thoughts that I thought…Read more…
Has UK corporate governance swung to the Left?
Continuing on from the theme of recent posts on workers on boards, despite some of the pushback from expected sources, what is really striking is how much corporate governance policy has shifted towards policies largely articulated by the Left in recen…Read more…
Workers on boards: handle with care
Before I get into the detail of this post I just want to make me thing clear: pension funds’ assets exist to fund pensions for the people that work for organisations – the workers. Those assets were also created by the labour of those workers – it is t…Read more…