Board‐level Employee Representation in Europe. Priorities, Power and Articulation Jeremy Waddington and Aline Conchon New York and London: Routledge, 2016, £95.00 hardback, 282 pages + xvi, ISBN: 978‐1‐138‐79202‐9 (hardback) ISBN: 978‐1‐315‐76238‐8 (e‐book)

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12130
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Date: 01 March 2016
• Author: Michael Gold

Book review

Board-level Employee Representation in Europe. Priorities, Power and Articulation

Jeremy Waddington and Aline Conchon

New York and London: Routledge, 2016, £95.00 hardback, 282 pages + xvi,

ISBN: 978-1-138-79202-9 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-315-76238-8 (e-book)

Tax avoidance, soaring rates of top executive pay, persistent environmental pollution

—even passing horsemeat off as beef…the list of corporate scandals goes on and on,

endlessly reported, but barely ever acted upon. As consumers, we are dependent on

multinational corporations for most of our daily needs, but as citizens and workers,

we have almost no influence over the decisions taken by their boards of directors.

In liberal market economies such decisions are taken virtually exclusively by share-

holder representatives. Yet amongst all the debates in the UK about ways to curb

shareholder supremacy—such as tightening up shareholder voting rights or extending

the fiduciary duties of directors—the composition of the board itself, and who is on it,

has almost escaped attention. Almost because the 2015 Labour Party Manifesto did

promise to place employee representatives on board-level remuneration committees,

and the recent Davies report advocated voluntary targets to ensure 33 per cent

women’s representation on FTSE 350 company boards by 2020 (a point returned to

in the succeeding text).

So are not we missing a trick? No panacea, certainly, but a step forward in securing

greater accountability of company boards at least to their workforces would be the

introduction of board-level employee representation (BLER) into UK legislation.

However, apart from the honourable exception of the Trades Union Congress, no

one is systematically making its case in the UK (and has not done so since the Bullock

Report in 1977 and the subsequent ill-fated White Paper of 1978). Indeed, most aca-

demic textbooks on human resource management today rarely refer to BLER in their

chapters on employee participation, even though it exists in 18 of the 28 European

Union (EU) member states, plus Norway. Ignorance may partially explain this lack

of debate. Research abounds on collective bargaining, consultation and direct em-

ployee involvement, but work on BLER in English is almost non-existent—at least,

until now. This admirable new book, written by Jeremy Waddington and Aline

Conchon in collaboration with the European Trade Union Institute, is based on over

4100 questionnaires returned from a survey of 17 500 board-level employee represen-

tatives across 16 EU countries plus Norway, a prodigious undertaking.

The book opens with an historical overview of BLER across Europe, proceeds to

outline the its legal regulation and subsequently examines its actual practice under

five main headings: morphology (including the characteristics of the companies in-

volved, economic consequences and the profile of the employee representatives); influ-

ence over board agendas and processes; the exercise of power on the board;

articulation (or how different types and levels of employee participation elsewhere

in the company all fit in with BLER); and conclusions—‘what does all this mean?’

The authors divide the literature on BLER into two branches focusing on corporate

governance and industrial relations, a division that feels slightly artificial in places, as

Industrial Relations Journal 47:2, 201–202

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd