“Participation rights in practice: what are the power bases of worker representatives at the board?”

“Workers’ right to be represented on the board (of directors, or supervisory board) of their company is so widespread in Europe that it is deemed a core element of the European social model. Yet, very little is known about how those participation rights operate in practice. This Policy Brief outlines some of the key findings of the first-ever questionnaire-based survey of worker representatives who serve on company boards in 16 European countries and in European Companies (SEs). It demonstrates that necessary conditions must be met for board-level worker representatives to be able to exert real power over corporate strategic decisions. A German version of the Policy Brief is available for free download on the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung website.”

Source: European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) – Participation rights in practice: what are the power bases of worker representatives at the board ? / European Economic, Employment and Social Policy / Policy Briefs

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Toxic Workplaces – Why Your Workplace Might Be Killing You

Why Your Workplace Might Be Killing You”  – this title of a short article refers to a paper “The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors and Mortality and Health Costs in the United States” by Joel Goh, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Stefanos A. Zenios. The authors summarize some of their research results as follows:

“We have seen that employer decisions about work and the workplace are associated with excess deaths and healthcare costs in the U.S.. To put our results in perspective, our model’s estimate of workplace-associated mortality is comparable to the fourth (cerebrovascular diseases) and fifth (accidents) largest cause of death in the U.S. in 2009 …, and exceeds the number of deaths from diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or influenza. Our model also estimates that the workplace-associated healthcare cost is comparable to the estimated cost of diabetes in the U.S. in 2007 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2011), which was

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“Images of organizations in various discursive fields: A correspondence analysis of metaphors in company reports”


Interesting paper by Martin Wolfslast (in German): Images of organizations in various discursive fields: A correspondence analysis of metaphors in company reports (PDF here).
“Abstract: This paper examines how companies endeavor to create legitimizing images of themselves and their practices by making use of metaphoric language. The analysis is based on the 2012 annual reports and sustainability reports of two major german energy companies and is conducted in two steps: A systematic metaphor analysis identifies 21 metaphorical concepts, which are further condensed to five meta concepts on the basis of the created company images: progress metaphor, control metaphor, harmony metaphor, conflict metaphor and euphemistic metaphor. In a following step, a correspondence analysis of the meta concepts used and the variety of topics addressed in the company reports (e.g. economic or social topics) identifies a variance of the concepts according to the thematic context. Most of the meta … Mehr lesen...