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…
Worker directors via the UK Corporate Governance Code
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…
Sports Direct chairman scrapes through
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…
Against predetermination, trivialisation etc
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…
Wearing different hats
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…
The Conservative corp gov calamity is an opportunity
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…
A new Left alignment on corporate governance
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…
Nex Group chair costs himself £25,000
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…
Chantal Mouffe interviewed in 2007
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB JA X-NONE …Read more…
In praise of conflict (not just the band)
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…
Shareholders go quiet on executive pay
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…