Asset managers and worker directors

The more I've been digging around for info on workers on boards, the more interesting things I find. For example, I had heard a rumour a while back that ATOS was thinking about appointing a UK employee director. And it turns out that they did. In fact they have two employee directors, one of whom is from the UK (scroll down here).

This is part of the shift amongst French companies to appoint employee shareholder representatives. When I dug into the ATOS example, I discovered that at the same AGM where the UK director was appointed another employee shareholder rep was rejected.

When I Googled around a bit I found NEST's voting disclosure which showed that UBS had voted against this proposed director.

That, of course, got me thinking about other employee representatives. And in NEST's disclosure you can see that it's not just UBS doing this, and it's not just happening at French companies.

That last example is a Polish company, and looking at its AGM results you can see that there were not insignificant votes against one of the employee reps.

I don't know anything about any of these companies, so there may be important factors behind these votes. But it shows you that these issues can get pretty sharp.