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March 14, 2019
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All A-Board! The Movement for Commonwealth Companies is on the Tracks!
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Dear H,
The push to seat workers on corporate boards is becoming a movement. As my co-author
Annie Malhotra and I wrote in The Commonwealth Company (a pending chapter in a forthcoming
"Many Futures of Work" book) we need to balance the power of shareholders with the
rights of stakeholders. Or, align the rights of shareholders and stakeholders,
in the language of capital stewardship. The fight for workers to participate in
the governance of companies, and to make the boss more accountable--is gaining
steam. In this Expresso, we re-post the Commonwealth piece and plug a cool new
shareholder campaign by CtW to add a worker to the Google board.
But first, here's a few mile-posts on the tracks:

*
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin have both introduced legislation to
require companies to seat workers on corporate boards, similar to German and Euro
co-determination structures. Members of the US House have taken up the cause.
According to Wikipedia, a majority of OECD and European Union countries had some
form of law guaranteeing the right of workers to vote for board representation.
*
A similar push is happening in the UK, which recently passed a new Corporate Governance
Code. As our friend Tom Powdrill tells it, all UK-listed companies have to comply
with it or explain why they don't. In the latest version, which came into force
at the start of this year, companies are expected to adopt a method of engaging
with the workforce. Options include appointing worker directors, designating an
existing non-executive director to engage with the workforce ,and setting up advisory
panels. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) has argued for worker directors, and a
few have been appointed.
*
Unions have been winning seats-representing workers--on boards through collective
bargaining. After UAW President Douglas Fraser's short stint on the Board of
Chrysler, announced three days after the government bail out of the 1980s, the
USW bargained for seats on the boards of USX and Bethlehem in the mid-1990s. Today,
the Autoworkers, Machinists and Pilots have seats on Daimler, United Continental
Holdings, Delta Airlines and Navistar International. This is great news-and we
should push for more seats so that management can't isolate individual union board
members.
*
The Change to Win Federation (CtW), a coalition of unions, has proposed to put an
employee on Google's board. This comes after an amazing global walkout by 200,000
Google employees that resulted in the company ending its forced arbitration rule.
The victory now means that workers can sue their bosses; forced arbitration prevented
employees who claimed sexual harassment or racial discrimination from fighting
back. We've included a WaPo piece on the board push below.
*
A good review of the immense logic of worker stakeholder seats can be found by Lenore
Palladino, Senior Economist and Policy Counsel at the Roosevelt Institute in "Why
Workers on Corporate Boards Just Makes Sense." Roosevelt has been carrying the
banner high on this issue. Justin Fox, at Bloomberg, penned a concise history of
German co-determination and works councils in "Why German Corporate Boards Include
Workers."
*
The idea is also politically popular, according to Palladino: In a recent poll by
Data for Progress, in which Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) made the case for stakeholder
governance, 52 percent of likely 2018 voters supported "establishing worker representation
on companies' boards of directors." Another 25 percent were unsure. Overall, employee
governance had net positive support in 100 percent of states and congressional
districts. [READ MORE [http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001rbv874FHQlfStEIAAlRbZssHDcRcigUyin81X0_E08rjw5al1oDlPrAk-Lv58KlpcZFHAiDBzGznQhetwZ58YETOzgHDN69FSFDCHGSYF1S2JoUhSmNaLo0N1BL5S8WwzlVV7_GILc2n6OkyVenHDkYsJ5OYwwF_lVlxFrb3QaOa93Hv4fuhNS_6rPkRL9W_zK_URpfBsx9GXQQM4LtvsAGJsX22seKcLnk9hpP7QDAKt-3aolneF0VK0IF1t0wzsETiyLT7P78-FPiS_SwRpjq1XYxLni0JcYVxYP5fhnX4Qu9MLbpKafexGTQvq-Ym&c=jeyZ2O6X0glSLNQQl7IUmFPSgHntDMXN1SWfV-0TofRPObPeo1IhBA==&ch=1PVAhPoaeSyGERlWFVHN-NHCJcb2tdZOHP5ycTJfSsxAJSfKkOdFWQ==]]
Until the next Expresso, keep on keepin' on!
Tom
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Suggestions toward Commonwealth Companies: Sharing Prosperity with Worker Stakeholders
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Tom Croft & Annie Malhotra
For over three decades, progressive investment policy leaders have been saying that
the owners of workers' capital--the workers--must prevent the misuse of their hard-earned
retirement savings and other assets by irrational short-term Wall Street schemes
that would harm them. In Working Capital: The Power of Labor's Capital(2001: Cornell
University Press), we labeled that harmful process "collateral damage."In this paper,
we call for stronger actions by workers as shareholders (who own a large chunk of
the capital markets)
and by workers as stakeholders (who are crucial, after all, to
the success of any enterprise) to invest responsibly and reclaim
their power to participate in the governance of companies. Both are calls to make
the boss more accountable and to move toward a "commonwealth company" framework.
We start by offering two distinct stories of how the roles of working people
were ignored and disparaged.

Worker at Timken Steel

Canton, Ohio. In June 2014, Timken Steel, a profitable, modernized manufacturer
of steel and bearings was forced to split into two following a shareholders' campaign.
Led by the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS), a signatory
to the UN's Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), the breakup was a product
of Relational Investors, an activist hedge fund founded by proteges of corporate
raider T. Boone Pickens. The break-up was forced to "unlock value." [READ MORE
[http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001rbv874FHQlfStEIAAlRbZssHDcRcigUyin81X0_E08rjw5al1oDlPrAk-Lv58KlpLGohrb_0J2_9YE2dUtDgiB4KvhDzAUR1bHH4RD9B6hTr_SXjffb2qnUfKWO3wKvcOSYhu3Fzbiw56X-v3wcniXEuy55K33YasRkJIUk4HdEbgB_fHgbIoyOZwFd8N9mpYJ9jSM3ytsE=&c=jeyZ2O6X0glSLNQQl7IUmFPSgHntDMXN1SWfV-0TofRPObPeo1IhBA==&ch=1PVAhPoaeSyGERlWFVHN-NHCJcb2tdZOHP5ycTJfSsxAJSfKkOdFWQ==]]
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This Investor Wants to Put an Employee on Google's Board
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Jena McGregor, The Washington Post
When more than 20,000 Google employees staged a mass global walkout in November,
the organizers published a list of demands that included, among other things, an
end to forced arbitration in harassment and discrimination cases, a commitment
to end pay inequity and the appointment of an employee representative to the company's
board of directors.

Now a shareholder has taken up that fight. CtW Investment Group, a group that
works with union-sponsored pension funds, filed an unusual proposal late last year
at Alphabet, Google's parent company, that calls for the board to nominate a nonexecutive
employee to be elected by investors as a director at next year's annual meeting.

If the proposal ends up on the company's proxy this year, it would likely be a
first for a technology company and one of the rare occasions when a shareholder
has tried to get an employee onto a U.S. corporate board. And at a time when several
2020 Democratic candidates have sponsored legislation that requires companies to
let employees elect a percentage of directors, the filing - though considered unlikely
to succeed - could garner attention. Economic inequality, scrutiny of the tech
industry and corporate power are expected to be big issues on next year's presidential
ballot.
CtW's filing, made in late 2018 but which has not previously been reported, argues
that an employee director would add to the "knowledge and insight on issues critical
to the success of the company" and would be "particularly useful in the board's
oversight of corporate culture." It pointed to ways it said the company is "out
of alignment with the values of its employees," such as the revelation that Google
had paid millions of dollars to executives who had been accused of sexual misconduct,
as well as employee opposition to projects in China and with the Pentagon. [READ
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fosters a "Community of Practice" for responsible economic impact investments. Heartland
promotes strategic responsible investments to rebuild the rebuilt environment, renew
the industrial commons, grow the clean economy, and make the boss more accountable.
Inspired by the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), Heartland
Capital Strategies (HCS) promotes investments and projects essential for revitalizing
our productive economy and community prosperity.

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