autres publications Gouvernance Normes d'encadrement parties prenantes place des salariés Publications
Parution récente : La place des salariés dans l’entreprise
Ivan Tchotourian 9 mars 2021 Ivan Tchotourian
Ouvrage qui mérite d’être lu : « La place des salariés dans l’entreprise » chez Mare et Martin. Un bel ouvrage d’Emmanuelle Mazuyer dont je recommande la lecture…
Résumé
Cinquante ans après les accords de Grenelle qui ont acté la création de la section syndicale dans les entreprises, et au moment des débats autour de la loi PACTE ambitionnant de « mieux associer les salariés à la vie et aux résultats des entreprises », ces contributions du présent ouvrage, mettent en perspective les questions fondamentales que soulève la problématique de la représentation et de l’implication des salariés dans l’entreprise.
Elles ont été pensées et organisées suivant la progressivité des formes d’association et de participation des salariés, de la verticalité vers davantage d’horizontalité, moins d’autoritarisme et peut-être plus de démocratie.
Cet ouvrage offre ainsi des regards croisés sur les différentes modalités de participation et d’implication (financière, actionnariale, syndicale, directe) des salariés à la gouvernance de l’entreprise. Critique, il interroge la distinction habituelle de la répartition des pouvoirs entre détenteurs du capital et force de travail dans l’entreprise. Novateur, il envisage les salariés en tant que parties prenantes ou actionnaires, voire dirigeants d’entreprises dans certains cas, afin d’offrir une vision large du rôle qu’ils peuvent jouer. Ouvert, il permet une lecture pluridisciplinaire (droit et économie) et comparée (droit anglais) sur la place des salariés dans l’entreprise.
À la prochaine…
autres publications Gouvernance place des salariés
Employee Participation in Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility : à découvrir !
Ivan Tchotourian 23 août 2016
Nouveau working paper de Martin Gelter pour le compte de l’ECGI intitulé : « Employee Participation in Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility » (Law Working Paper No. 322/2016, juillet 2016).
The chapter investigates the impact of employee participation on the board of directors or supervisory board (particularly codetermination) on corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Conceptually, it is important to distinguish between “internal” and “external” CSR. Internal CSR relates to practices of the firm regarding groups with which it is in a long-term contractual relationship such as employees. Employee participation systems serve to protect employees from shareholder opportunism and shift the balance in the distribution of corporate rents in favor of employees, which is why they clearly have an impact on internal CSR. The situation is much less clear for external CSR, which is concerned with effects of corporate activities that are externalities, for example pollution.
I argue that there may sometimes be a tradeoff between internal and external CSR: If a firm is more profitable because it scores badly in terms of external CSR (e.g. because it habitually pollutes), employees may benefit similarly as shareholders. In fact, the interests of shareholders and employees may be largely aligned in this respect, with both either benefiting or being harmed concurrently.
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Ivan Tchotourian
autres publications mission et composition du conseil d'administration Normes d'encadrement Nouvelles diverses place des salariés
Système allemand de codétermination : un modèle exportable ?
Ivan Tchotourian 22 juillet 2016
Alors que Theresa May a fait part de son intérêt d’importer en Grande-Bretagne le système allemand, MM. Horst Eidenmüller, Mathias Habersack, Caspar Behme et Lars Klöhn reviennent sur la pertinence de cette proposition en jetant un regard prudent (de chercheurs !) sur ce système : « Corporate Co-Determination German-Style as a Model for the UK? » (18 juillet 2016).
On 13 July 2016, Theresa May took up office as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Only shortly before, she had made headlines when she proposed to adopt European-style worker representation on the boards of leading companies.
Corporate co-determination hence seems to gain a certain degree of popularity with the British government – which is highly astonishing, considering that it was the UK which most fiercely fought against co-determination on a European level. It was mainly the diverging views of the UK and Germany on co-determination which have thwarted projects like the Draft Fifth Company Law Directive or the establishment of a European Private Company (Societas Privata Europaea, SPE). It is downright ironic that while the UK now shows an interest in co-determination, the concept is being questioned in Germany after decades of lying dormant. The reason for the new German discussion of co-determination are doubts regarding the compatibility of its specific form of co-determination with higher-ranking Union law. This post provides a brief overview of the most recent developments in German co-determination law that were the focus of a joint Oxford/Munich conference at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich in March 2016.
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Ivan Tchotourian
autres publications engagement et activisme actionnarial place des salariés Structures juridiques
Qui est propriétaire de l’entreprise ?
Ivan Tchotourian 8 juillet 2016
C’est à cette question que s’attaquent Virgile Chassagnon et Xavier Hollandts dans un article intitulé : « Who are the owners of the firm: shareholders, employees or no one? » (Journal of Institutional Economics, 2014, Vo. 10, pp 47-69).
Voici le résumé :
The issue of firm ownership is an ongoing debate. For several decades, contractarian theory has undoubtedly shaped the academic debate in both law and economics. Proponents of this approach suggest that shareholders can legitimately be considered the owners of a firm because they hold shares. This approach, though attractive, is legally incorrect. Legal scholars have noted that a corporation cannot legally belong to shareholders or other stakeholders; no one owns the firm (and a corporation). The question of firm ownership masks the following crucial issue: Who should govern the firm? In this article, after returning to the theoretical debate on firm ownership and explaining why a firm cannot be owned, we shall analyze power as the core of firm governance. This approach is a potentially relevant and accurate way to address the problems of specific human investment, collective creation and productive (consummate) cooperation in modern firms.
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Ivan Tchotourian
autres publications Gouvernance mission et composition du conseil d'administration place des salariés
Article sur la gouvernance des entreprises en Allemagne
Ivan Tchotourian 18 février 2016
Le professeur Klaus Hopt qu’on ne présente plus vient de publier un nouvel article qui intéressera les lecteurs de notre blogue : « The German Law of and Experience with the Supervisory Board » (ECGI, Law Working Paper No. 305/2016).
Together with a number of other countries including China, Germany has a two-tier board system, i.e. its stock corporation law provides for the division between the management board and the supervisory board. This is different from most other countries, for example the USA, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and others.
Both board systems have their assets, yet in principle both fulfil adequately the task of control over management; there is no clear superiority of one of the two of them. The national board systems are highly path-dependent. Germany has had the supervisory board ever since the late 19th century when the state gave up its concession system, i.e. the approval and supervision of corporations by the state, and introduced a mandatory supervisory board to take over this task from the state. Germany strictly refuses to give shareholders the option to choose between the two systems.
Labor codetermination in the supervisory board may be one of the reasons for this refusal. While European legislators have been rather prudent in regulating board matters, there has been a considerable de facto convergence between the two systems. Yet path-dependent divergences remain, as to Germany this is true particularly in respect of quasi-parity and full parity labor codetermination in the board of corporations, but also as regards stakeholder orientation and a codified law of groups of companies featuring corresponding board duties for both parent and subsidiary companies.
The German Stock Corporation Act and the German Corporate Governance Code contain extensive provisions on both the management board and the supervisory board. The provisions on the supervisory board have been considerably reformed since the late 1990s. Today, German corporate governance under the two-tier board system is more or less in line with international good corporate governance.
In Germany there are considerable controversies concerning (i) the diversity requirements of 2015, (ii) the definition of independence for supervisory board candidates, (iii) the pros and cons of mandatory quasi-parity and full-parity labor codetermination and (iv) the role of the non-binding German Corporate Governance Code. The article pursues two goals: It informs a non-German audience on the regulation of the supervisory board in Germany, both by law and code, highlighting major current problems and controversies, and it undertakes a functional assessment of the experience with and the functioning of the supervisory board in a comparative perspective.
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Ivan Tchotourian
autres publications Gouvernance place des salariés
Actionnariat salarié : rapport du Center for American Progress
Ivan Tchotourian 11 novembre 2015
Le Center for American Progress vient de publier un rapport sur l’actionnariat salarié : « Mitigating Risk to Maximize the Benefits of Employee Ownership » (28 octobre 2015).
Employee ownership can be a powerful tool to ensure that workers at all levels are able to share in the gains of a company’s collective performance. Research shows that employee ownership typically provides a host of benefits—not just for workers but also for businesses and investors. If these programs were to grow throughout the economy, they could promote broad-based wealth creation, thereby fostering sustainable economic growth and reducing inequality.
This report has two goals. The first goal is to answer questions about undue risk in order to prevent companies from adopting employee ownership structures that endanger workers and jeopardize the collective benefits of broad-based sharing. The second goal is to help create widespread support for policies that would encourage greater adoption of beneficial employee ownership and other sorts of broad-based profit-sharing programs throughout the economy.
À la prochaine…
Ivan Tchotourian
