Abstract:

Reasonable corporate governance can provide a micro material and organizational basis for our country to improve primary distribution and promote common prosperity. Extreme shareholder centralism is not conducive to the maximization of the company’s long-term interests, but also causes an imbalance in the distribution of labor and capital; and generalized stakeholder protection is not feasible. For appropriate employee-shareholder cooperative corporate governance is in line with the goals of sustainable development and common prosperity, it can promote corporate efficiency and fair distribution, improve the implementation efficiency of labor laws, and achieve win-win cooperation between shareholders and employees. Although China has the appearance of employee-shareholder collaboration, it faces challenges such as vague positioning of employee supervisors, lack of independence, lack of employee profit sharing mechanism, and employee-related information disclosure as a mere formality, making it impossible to balance efficiency and fairness. Under the prospect of common prosperity, China should moderately correct short-sighted shareholder centralism, take the opportunity of state-owned companies and listed companies to improve ESG performance, and steadily optimize employee-shareholder cooperative corporate governance from the following three aspects on the basis of corporate autonomy: Firstly, building an employee director system with employee protection as the core, and ensuring their independent performance of duties by allocating special powers, requiring them to participate in remuneration committees, and selecting representatives from local trade unions; secondly, encouraging certain types of companies to embed employee benefit sharing clauses in their articles of association, and building a fairer employee stock ownership system for listed companies; thirdly, building a mandatory employee-related information disclosure system, and setting specific disclosure indicators based on the materiality of investors and employees. These optimization measures require the coordination of labor laws, securities laws, and fiscal and taxation laws.

Key words: common prosperity, corporate governance, employee-shareholder collaboration, employee directors, employee stock ownership