Twenty years of employee and employee shareholder representation on the board of directors. Attributes, review and outlook[20 ans de représentation des salariés et des actionnaires salariés au CA]

Representation of employees and employee shareholders on boards of directors is the subject of increasing attention, both in France and internationally. Since the early 2000s, several pieces of legislation have reinforced this representation and contributed to the development of what some call a French-style co-determination model. Researchers have subsequently been trying to establish the link between this type of representation and the different measures of performance, on the assumption that the attributes of employee directors and employee shareholder directors play a major role. This report aims to pursue this line of enquiry by highlighting the attributes of these representatives, from a perspective comparing employees and employee shareholders. For this study, we have collected, over a period of 20 years, information on the attributes of representatives, both demographic (i.e. gender, age, internationalisation, education, duration of mandate, length of time with the company, and union membership) and statutory (i.e. committee membership, committee missions), and gathered the opinions of various experts (i.e. directors, union officials, government agencies) on some of the trends observed. This unique data collection reveals a high degree of variation in all attributes over the period, thus highlighting the impact of certain laws and regulations as well as disparities between the two categories of directors.