Documents Vitols, Sigurt 62 results

"Should companies primarily serve the interests of shareholders, or are they responsible to a broader set of stakeholders, including their own workers? The financial crisis has exposed the deficits of the current regulatory framework for companies, as it prioritizes short-term shareholder value at the expense of the long-term interests of stakeholders.
In this book, members of the GOODCORP network of researchers and trade unionists present their proposals for European company law which would encourage companies to follow sustainable, stakeholder-oriented strategies. Key proposals include: revising our understanding of the firm and its key stakeholders; strengthening stakeholder ‘voice' in companies; increasing the transparency of companies through binding requirements for social and environmental reporting; and negotiating employee-friendly agreements with investors through collective bargaining.
This book follows up on The Sustainable Company: a new approach to corporate governance (published by the ETUI in 2011 and edited by Vitols and Kluge), which outlined GOODCORP's vision of an alternative to the shareholder value orientation of the current system of corporate governance. "

"This document provides recommendations for the transposition of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which should be transposed by Member States by 6 July 2024. It includes recommendations on:
• Issues which are critical for workers' representatives and trade unions which should be specified in the transposition, specifically:
o Information and consultation rights – Who is consulted? How and when does consultation take place?
o Supervision of sustainability reporting – which authority is responsible for ensuring proper conduct in auditing and reporting? Are trade unions included in the authority's governance? Is there a complaint mechanism? Who funds the authority?
• Options for Member States explicitly provided in the CSRD.
• Points where transposition beyond the minimum CSRD requirements could be strived for.

The ETUC recommendations in this document are informed by research conducted by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) with the support of GoodCorp, its expert network on Corporate Governance, and its Monaco network which monitors the transposition of EU company law Directives with a focus on their impact on workers‘ rights. This research is supported by the European Workers Participation Fund (EWPF) at the ETUI. "

"Is worker participation becoming more prominent or less? Furthermore, what is the impact of worker participation on economic performance? This article introduces a tool designed by researchers at the ETUI to help answer these questions: the European Participation Index (EPI), a country-level summary measure of the strength of workers' voice in companies. The EPI is based on (i) union density and collective bargaining coverage, (ii) workplace representation and (iii) board-level representation. This multi-level index provides an alternative to existing cross-national measures by taking into consideration two levels at which worker participation can take place: the workplace and the board. The article shows first that worker participation has become less prevalent in the EU over the past decade; and second that the EPI is robust and has superior explanatory power in relation to income inequality compared with traditional measures of collective bargaining."

"This book presents the results of a study of workers' rights during company takeover situations in Europe. Takeovers are extremely important for workers because a change in ownership frequently leads to restructuring in the firm, including replacement of management, changed working conditions, increased work intensity and/or mass redundancies. It is therefore crucial that workers have strong rights to receive timely and full information about the planned takeover and to intervene at an early stage of the takeover process to protect their interests. The major conclusion of the book is that the EU Takeover Bids Directive needs to be revised, as it does not provide an adequate level of workers' rights in its current form.



The study was carried out by the ETUI's GOODCORP network of academic and trade union experts on corporate governance and company law. The book includes case studies of takeovers as well as analyses of national legal frameworks regulating takeovers and of transversal issues related to takeovers. The book is the first in a new ETUI book series on workers' rights in company law."