The wrong way to empower workers

Labour’s plans to put staff on boards and give them shares are well meaning but flawed.

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Volkswagen: kind to workers, but still a cheat

Staff should be represented on the board. Dividends should be split between workers and shareholders. Every company should have schemes to pay people in shares as well as a salary. At the Labour Party conference this week, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, set out radical plans to turn workers into shareholders.Right across the developed world, politicians are getting more and more interested in some form of workers' representation. In this country, the Labour Party is now jumping on that bandwagon. It would make companies with more than 250 staff put aside 10% of their equity over the course of a decade to share with their employees.

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Matthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg, and writes weekly commentary syndicated in papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Miami Herald. He is also an associate editor of Spectator Business, and a regular contributor to The Spectator. Before that, he worked for the business section of the Sunday Times for ten years. 

He has written books on finance and financial topics, including Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031. Matthew is also the author of the Death Force series of military thrillers and the founder of Lume Books, an independent publisher.