Comment by pasiaj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pasiaj | Hacker News Reader

I recently had a discussion with a board professional, a female, who has sat in boards of publicly traded companies in Germany, Finland and Sweden.

Finnish law does not dictate board composition of companies in any way. In Sweden, companies of 25+ employees in most cases have 2 or more representatives in company board. Germany has a dual board system. Employee representatives have a right to seats on the supervisory board of larger companies – one-third in companies with 500 to 2,000 employees, half in companies with more than 2,000. If I understood this correctly, employees are represented by a union official.

Her view was that the German system is simply a bad model that doesn't work. At the same time she credited the Swedish system for the fairly low number of strikes and union activities in Sweden, saying that board representation creates a more keen understanding of business realities throughout union representatives & employees.

She advocated for Finland adopting similar policy to Sweden.

It's interesting to read about the different systems and her perspective on it. As described, however, her bias is stereotypical: The interests she represents, management, are the only valid interests and the only benefit of employee representation is that they understand management's interests.

The reason for employee representation is that they have their own interests, independent of hers, and the reason for democratic representation in general is that humans have a hard time giving real weight to others' priorities. They'll help them when they can, but certainly not if it involves real costs and trade-offs to their own, obviously far more important interests. With representation, the employees don't need her good will; they have the power to act for themselves.

> "...the reason for democratic representation in general is that humans have a hard time giving real weight to others' priorities. They'll help them when they can, but certainly not if it involves real costs and trade-offs to their own, obviously far more important interests..."

I apologise if this draws away from the primary point of your comment, but I thought this was quite poignant. It's a sentiment that manages to convey my intuition about the motivation behind hard-line anti-socialist groups, and also has the added bonus of explaining why "feel-good" one-off donation/volunteering stories in the media are so popular. People like to pat themselves on the back for helping others, as long as they aren't inconvenienced. People like to praise social constructs that help others, as long as they don't encourage constructs that inconvenience themselves.

In what way doesn't it work? Germany has quite a few quite successful companies, world market leaders in their fields and a quite good social relationship. Certainly there are issues, but far from "doesn't work" in my observation.

Or, Germany has some successful companies that can afford inefficiencies.

Maybe. A related question also is what a measurement for "good" is. Successful companies with unhappy society isn't nneccisarily a good society.

That's why I asked for details instead of an anecdotal unspecific remark by one person.

In this case, the evidence for "doesn't work" would be a REDUCTION in the number of successful companies, not a complete absence of successful companies. And there are so many confounding variables that it is impossible to tease apart the effect of this policy on board membership from every other thing about German law and culture that might affect company success.

Correct, the GP poster made a statement stating the model of employee representatives as members of the board to cause more bad than good without any supporting facts, so I'm asking for prove. More than "she said it was bad [because she couldn't execute her bad ideas?]" Would be nice. The GP made a bold statement.

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