Dear
Vic,
Thank
you very much for your paper “Employee ownership – a political alternative or a
pig in a poke?”
You
paint a wide picture and you launch many ideas and this is what our employee
ownership movement needs now. Maybe you’re right that a revived movement for
worker ownership and self-management in production can provide cohesion; this is
what I guess too.
I
deeply agree with your conclusion that worker ownership and self-management must
be the key elements in any social and political programme, and that the biggest
obstacle to a wider discussion of employee ownership is the lack of a bold
statement regarding what it implies for control and responsibility in corporate
governance.
In
this way, the first theme for our Fourth European Meeting of Employee Ownership
in Bilbao and Mondragon in November will be the lessons of the Enron affair (and
others) for employee ownership; we’ll hold a roundtable as the opening session
of the meeting. In this sense, your paper gives an excellent indication.
Probably, I shall ask you to be a speaker in this roundtable, but I choose to
let this roundtable open until we all meet in Washington in October. The
programme of the Bilbao Meeting will be disseminate in the following days, and
you will see that this roundtable will be chaired by David Binns and that we
have a first speaker in the person of Eric De Keuleneir who chairs the Belgian
Fondation des Administrateurs – probably you know him.
On
the other hand, it could be helpful if we could have a French translation of
your paper; do you have any intention in this sense?
I
disagree with you on some points. I think that on the long run, the stock market
is still the same guide. In the recent crisis, we saw all investors being
deceived (private investors, pension funds or employee shareholders as well) –
this is what happened in every capitalist and stock crisis. The fact that we saw
the biggest corporate bankruptcies in world history is not new, because this is
what happened in every crisis, from around ten to ten years since a lot of time.
You
point the fact that corporate managers escaped to control because of changes in
their compensation through stock options. If this is right, it is not a
fundamental change in stock exchange role, but something that could be easily
remedy.
Finally,
if stockowners couldn’t definitely be able to exert their control, how could it
be different for employee stockowners? I believe in employee share ownership,
because it can help for controlling corporate management.
I
don’t like ATTAC and the Tobin Tax. But I fully agree with you that our employee
ownership movement should take a main place in such social and political
debates.
In
this way, I took the initiative to send a contribution of EFES to the European
consultation on the Green Paper on Corporate Social Responsibility. We sent also
a contribution to the European Convention.
More
than that, I took the contacts to ask for EFES becoming a member of the
European Platform of Social NGOs, and of the European Corporate Social
Responsibility Network.
It
is very interesting to see that these two organisations gave a defensive answer.
On the other hand, going a bit further in analysing these organisations (you see
a lot of information in database CONECCS of the European Commission), I saw that
they are mainly funded by the European Commission (I saw a 98% for the Platform
of Social NGOs). This sounds more than strange to me.
Anyway,
I think that we have to engage ourselves in these main debates and movements, at
European level and at global level as well.
As
EFES organizer, I call for every help to develop our force in this way. The
place to discuss this point within EFES will be the workshops we’ll have on the
Saturday in Bilbao; I’d be very grateful to you to make a presentation in this
sense with practical proposals.
Finally,
I deeply agree with you about the importance to give answer and to meet the
obstacles that you describe under “labour’s dualism”. This is really a main
brake for us in Europe, at European level and within many countries as well
(with some specific elements in every of them). I have some ideas of what we
could do about that in Belgium and we are preparing a specific project for this
country. I think that “labour’s dualism” is one of the main reasons for the lack
of interest for employee ownership in several European countries; I think that
we should now develop adequate projects in each of these countries; I point
Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Greece, Portugal.
Thank
you again for your rich contribution.
With
very best regards