In a blatant publicity stunt, Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders plans to crash Walmart's annual shareholder meeting:
Bernie Sanders plans to crash Walmart Inc.’s annual shareholder meeting next month, but he won’t get the VIP treatment that the retailer usually extends to famous guests.
Sanders, a longtime critic of labor practices at the nation’s biggest private employer, will introduce a shareholder proposal at the June 5 meeting in Rogers, Arkansas, a spokeswoman for his campaign said. The proposal, which has no chance of passing, calls for Walmart to give its hourly workers a board seat.
According to a press report:
“We should have the power to decide what happens at the company many of us have given our working lives to,” Davis said in a statement.
Wrong. As I discussed in my article, Privately Ordered Participatory Management: An Organizational Failures Analysis (September 1997), available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=38600, there are significant costs to employee voice/representation while the benefits are most uncertain:
Michael Dooley opines that workers will be indifferent to most corporate decisions that do not bear directly on working conditions and benefits: “As to the majority of managerial policies concerning, for example, dividend and investment policies, product development, and the like, the typical employee has a much interest and as much to offer as the typical purchaser of light bulbs.” Dooley’s argument is supported by a number of empirical studies. John Witte’s case study, for example, found that workers who did not desire participation often cited a lack of managerial expertise as the reason. John Cotton’s review of the literature concluded that participatory management is most effective when it is directed at “one’s everyday work, not [at] deciding policy issues of the entire organization.” Sagie and Koslowsky found that “subordinate participation in tactical decisions (those dealing with working methods), as opposed to strategic decisions (those dealing with the initiation of a new product or service), was a better predictor of an increase in change acceptance, work satisfaction, effectiveness, and time allotted to work.” All of which tends to suggest that employee representatives add little except increased labor advocacy to the board.