Sarah Anderson at Inequality.org writes—US, UK Progressive Leaders Aim to Open Corporate Boardrooms to Workers:
When corporate directors meet to approve lavish CEO pay packages, nothing can spoil the mood quite like having a rank-and-file worker at the table.
“They get embarrassed,” one worker representative on the board of a major European company told the London-based Centre for Labour and Social Studies.
“Knowing full well that I represent people who’ve had a 1 percent rise in pay for the last five years,” it’s hard for them to award a massive CEO bonus, the worker explained.
Prominent progressive leaders in both the United Kingdom and the United States want to crank up this embarrassment factor by requiring large corporations in their countries to include worker representatives on their boards.
“Decisions taken in boardrooms affect people’s pay, their jobs, and their pensions,” UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said as he announced a plan recently to allow workers to select up to 30 percent of board members. “Workers deserve a real say in those decisions.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced a similar proposal. Her Accountable Capitalism Act would require corporations with annual revenue of more than $1 billion to allow employees to pick at least 40 percent of board members.
The proposals are popular in both countries. A 2016 poll by the UK Trades Union Congress found that 59 percent of Brits support worker reps on boards of large corporations, with only 10 percent opposed. In a recent poll of likely U.S. voters, 52 percent were supportive and only 23 percent were opposed. [...]
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2011—What do you call a jobs plan that wouldn't create jobs? The Republican plan!
Ouch. This is just the headline for The Washington Post's fact check on the Republican jobs bill: "The GOP’s ludicrous claim about their jobs bill." Ludicrous seems generous.
The crux of the problem is the claim that the plan, "mostly a mish-mash of previous offered bills, such as that hardy perennial—a balanced budget amendment to the constitution," would create five million jobs. So the fact checker, aka Glenn Kessler, digs down into the methodology used by Republican Sens. Rand Paul, John McCain and Rob Portman to claim that five million figure.
Moira Bagley, a spokesman for Paul, said the figure was derived from three proposals: individual and corporate tax cuts that reduced the top tax rate of 25 percent, which the Heritage Foundation said would boost employment by 1.6 million jobs over the next decade; a tax holiday allowing U.S. companies to return cash held overseas, which a Chamber of Commerce study said would create 2.9 million jobs in two years; and a study by energy consultant Wood MacKenzie, which said allowing access to domestic energy resources and imports of Canadian oil would generate more than 1 million jobs by 2018.
There are several problems with these figures.
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