Documents Villiers, Charlotte 6 results

"Climate change and the pursuit of sustainability and sustainable business might be regarded as among the world's “wicked problems”, especially as they are multi-dimensional problems. Achieving corporate accountability in this context is also difficult when corporate structures are complex as they operate globally and through supply chains. At the European level, under the Green Deal, the Sustainable Finance Initiative and the Sustainable Corporate Governance Initiative include new reporting requirements to amend and expand the scope and application of the 2014 Non-Financial Reporting Directive, alongside changes to directors' duties to ensure they take account of stakeholders' needs and environmental and human rights due diligence requirements. This paper will argue that these legislative and regulatory efforts are to be welcomed, but the complexity of the regulation threatens to undermine its potential impact. It may therefore be necessary to reduce some of the complexity of the regulatory arrangements. However, some complexity may increase resilience and adaptability for responding to the risks involved in the uncertainty and unpredictability of climate change and in dealing with complex corporate structures. The answer is to provide robust regulation that will prompt the corporate behaviours required to avoid the catastrophic trajectory we currently face."

"This article attempts to explain how corporate governance and macro- economic policies have impacted on the role of workers and their representatives in the corporate environment and to consider how this has affected their capacity to protect themselves in the context of the financial crisis. It also considers the strategies they might adopt to strengthen their position in the future. It argues for the need to reposition labour law in the legal hierarchy as a first condition but also, and more importantly, that for democratic reasons, trade unions need to work collectively with other civil society and protest move- ments to hold corporations, national governments, and European institutions to account and, internally, to develop the class consciousness of old and new members. "

"This paper assesses the likely contribution of the European Company Statute (ECS) and accompanying Directive on employee involvement to the development of participatory workplaces in the European Union. The argument advanced is that the Directive has economic aspirations that outweigh its social objectives and that the prospects for employee participation are cosmetic rather than real. An improved mutual understanding between commercial actors and labour relations actors is required in order to appreciate more fully the interaction between corporate structures and employment rights. More effective dialogue between participants in the two fields is necessary, without which employee representatives have little choice but to pursue a stronger adversarial approach to industrial relations."

"Following a series of corporate governance scandals which involved exploitative treatment of workers, reforms were introduced to the UK's corporate governance system in 2018, presented both as an attempt to rebuild trust and to afford a stronger voice for workers in that system. This paper explores the new landscape from a workers' voice and protection perspective. It highlights that, while corporate governance has a role in ensuring workers' needs are met, there is a tension between the goals of any reforms in this territory: board-level employee representation could be seen as a way of democratising the economy and valuing the part played by labour in that process, but it could also be seen as a way of increasing corporate value, economic performance or employee motivation, and disregarding the implications for labour. It is argued in this paper that worker protection requires a more genuine workplace democracy with full involvement of trade union representation. This would also help to broaden the corporate governance framework's horizon towards a more genuine stakeholder vision beyond the existing tokenistic legal and regulatory nods in that direction."