I can understand why Theresa May should want to toy with the idea of having ‘workers’ representatives on board’. As with Tony Blair and his promise to be tough on crime, and David Cameron and gay marriage, it has become a tradition in modern-day elections that a party campaigning from a position of strength makes an audacious raid behind the lines to plant a flag in some prominent place in enemy territory. It creates the impression that you are not merely trying to pitch for votes at the fringes of your opponents’ traditional homeland – you are confident enough to present yourself as a government for everyone.
May’s proposals are, however, highly tokenistic. She has not really converted to the TUC’s dream world, where companies are run by bosses in association with the workers. Her promise for workers on board, made when she entered Downing Street, has been watered down for having a ‘worker’s representative’ on the board, which isn’t quite the same thing. In practice, all it might mean is an existing director being appointed ‘worker’s representative’, and expected to hold the odd meeting with workers. FTSE 100 businesses are not going to find themselves brought down by poor decisions made by floor-sweepers and toilet-cleaners who have been suddenly elevated to the boardroom.
What should worry conservatives, though, is the language. The whole concept of ‘workers’ representatives’ on the board implies that people who serve on company boards don’t actually do any work themselves. It perpetuates a view of the British class system which is seriously out of date. What about the many business leaders who have worked their way up from the bottom of their companies – the sometime hod-carriers and shelf stackers who, through their own efforts, gained promotion to the top of businesses? If anyone can be said to represent the interests of workers it is them. They have shown junior staff what is possible if they work hard, and have an understanding of what it is like to be at the bottom of an organisation.
It should be the Conservatives’ ambition to encourage the rise of junior workers through the ranks of management, to steer them in that direction rather than thinking the only way to advancement is through the trade union movement. The Conservatives’ policy on industrial relations should be summed up thus: don’t fight the bosses; become a boss yourself. The idea of workers’ representatives on the board works against this. It perpetuates the idea of businesses as social hierarchies, your place in which depends on the accident of your birth and that as a worker you are doomed to spend your entire working life under the thumb of the bosses. It is right that the Conservatives think of ways the law can be used to protect workers from exploitation. However, on workers and boardrooms, there is a far more positive message which they should be projecting.
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