Employment rights and the shareholder: workers rights vs 'owners' rights.

The thesis will provide a detailed and schematic exposition of the relationship between corporate law and labour rights in the UK, in particular the ways in which shareholder rights in corporate law serve to limit the realisation of labour rights. The project research outputs will support the policy work of the CASE partner The Institute of Employment Rights, by extending analysis of the contemporary function of UK labour rights to the area of corporate law.
The approach will seek to de-naturalize the twin institutions of capitalist political economy; the corporation and the market, by exploring how core principles of corporate law are constitutive of the social power relations of the corporation in ways which have implications for workers and the pursuit of effective labour rights. The analysis will examine five features of corporate law which corporate law scholars claim correspond closely to the Anglo-American model, and increasingly may represent a set of global 'core principles' of corporate law: corporate legal personality, shareholder limited liability, shareholder ownership, delegated management and freely transferable shares. The fields of securities regulation, competition law, and accountancy regulation will inform the analysis where they intersect with corporate and labour law in constructing the corporate entity.
The account of labour rights underpinning the study derives from the International Labour Organisation fundamental principle that "labour is not a commodity", expressed in the preamble to the ILO's foundational Declaration of Philadelphia 1944. Labour rights are considered to encompass: Trade Union rights, the right to strike, the right to just remuneration, rights to safe work and freedom from coercion or forced work, rights to voice and participation. The corporation is considered a key site for struggles over the commodification of labour as it mediates hierarchical relations between capital investors and workers. The labour-capital relationship therefore is analysed as a social relation of capitalism, in contrast to dominant framings within corporate governance which present labour and capital as politically neutral economic categories. The ways in which the corporation, and techniques of corporate governance practice and regulation translate capital market pressures into business practices which impact upon labour rights is a key point of analysis.
The thesis will challenge the conceptual separation of shareholder and worker rights which is prevalent in both the corporate governance and labour law bodies of literature, which distinguishes the governance rights of shareholders from the contract based rights of workers. This includes analysing the limitations of 'contract' as the conceptual foundation for labour rights in the context of the corporation. In critiquing notions of contract, I shall explore the function of alternative logics in legal and economic theory. The logic of property in the construction of shareholder rights will be considered, in particular the relationship between shareholders capital based 'ownership' of the firm and control rights in the legal development of shareholder and labour rights. In analysing logics of power which go beyond the bilateral contract of employment, the thesis will question the legal boundaries of the firm and the implications of this for labour rights in the context of fragmented organisational forms; corporate groups, subordinate supply chains and commercialised labour relationships such as franchising.