Abstract

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.

中文翻译：

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公司治理、员工的声音和员工的利益：“世界领先的企业改革方案”的破碎承诺

摘要

在一系列涉及剥削工人的公司治理丑闻之后，英国于 2018 年对公司治理体系进行了改革，旨在重建信任并为该体系中的工人提供更强有力的发言权。本文从工人的声音和保护的角度探讨了新形势。它强调，虽然公司治理在确保工人需求得到满足方面发挥作用，但该领域的任何改革目标之间都存在紧张关系：董事会级别的员工代表可以被视为实现经济民主化和评估经济价值的一种方式。劳动力在这一过程中发挥了重要作用，但它也可以被视为提高企业价值、经济绩效或员工积极性的一种方式，而忽略了对劳动力的影响。本文认为，工人保护需要更真正的工作场所民主，工会代表的充分参与。这也将有助于拓宽公司治理框架的视野，实现更真实的利益相关者愿景，超越现有的象征性法律和监管向该方向点头。