Corporate governance for sustainability : Statement

The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock buybacks, excessive dividends and a failure to invest in productive capabilities. The result is a ‘tragedy of the horizon’, with corporations and their shareholders failing to consider environmental, social or even their own, long-term, economic sustainability. With less than a decade left to address the threat of climate change, and with consensus emerging that businesses need to be held accountable for their contribution, it is time to act and reform corporate governance in the EU. The statement puts forward specific recommendations to clarify the obligations of company boards and directors and make corporate governance practice significantly more sustainable and focused on the long term

Associations between sleep duration and sleep debt with insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion in the EGIR-RISC Study

Aim: Extremes in sleep duration play an important role in the development of type 2 diabetes. We examined the associations between sleep duration and sleep debt with estimates of insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion. Methods: Data were derived from the European multi-centre EGIR-RISC study. Sleep duration and sleep debt were derived from a sleep questionnaire asking about sleeping time during the week and during the weekend. Insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion were estimated from a 2-hour Oral Glucose Tolerance Test, with samples every 30 minutes. Associations between sleep duration and sleep debt with insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion, were analysed by multiple linear regression models corrected for possible confounders. Results: Sleep data were available in 1002 participants, 46% men, mean age 48 ± 8 years, who had an average sleep duration of 7 ± 1 hours [range 3–14] and an average sleep debt (absolute difference hours sleep weekend days minus weekdays) of 1 ± 1 hour [range 0–8]. With regard to insulin sensitivity, we observed an inverted U-shaped association between sleep duration and the Stumvoll MCR in (mL/kg/min), with a corrected β (95% CI) of 2.05 (0.8; 3.3) and for the quadratic term −0.2 (−0.3; −0.1). Similarly, a U-shaped association between sleep duration and log HOMA-IR in (µU/mL), with a corrected βs of −0.83 (−1.4; −0.24) and 0.06 (0.02; 0.10) for the quadratic term. Confounders showed an attenuating effect on the associations, while BMI mediated 60 to 91% of the association between sleep duration and insulin sensitivity. No significant associations were observed between sleep duration with insulin secretion or between sleep debt with either insulin sensitivity or insulin secretion. Conclusions: Short and long sleep duration are associated with a lower insulin sensitivity, suggesting that sleep plays an important role in insulin resistance and may provide the link with development of type 2 diabetes

Labour and trade union cultures: the idiosyncratic experience of the European dockworkers in the 19th to the 21st centuries

International audienceNothing predisposed the ports, where random hiring-and-firing practices reigned supreme and anyone could turn up in the hope of a few hours’ work, to become bastions of trade union strength able to perform the astonishing feat of forging a distinction between flexible work and casual labour. Yet this is what happened in the immediate post-war period when ports and docklands entered the third age of cargo-handling services, a phase characterized for the dockworkers by guaranteed terms of employment that marked the completion of a long process of struggle for recognition and definition of their specific occupational status. Whether in relation to hiring procedures or the tasks performed, the dockworkers of 2010 have little in common with those of the 1950s or 1930s; little, that is, except for a culture that continues to form the basis of a collective identity in which trade unionism is still very much a live force. These developments have received, curiously enough, scant attention, no doubt because the highly specific features of work in the ports made it extremely difficult to export elsewhere what was a unique set of sectional corporatist gains. And yet this experience does raise questions that transcend sectional occupational considerations in the search for alternatives to contingent and precarious labour practices

Sectoral Issues and Environmental Causes: The Mobilization of the French Basque Fishermen after the Sinking of the Prestige

This article analyses the mobilization of French Basque fishermen following the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige off the coast of Galicia (Spain) in 2002. This environmental disaster led to intense political action and bottom-up mobilization in the French Basque region, especially within a profession already undergoing structural changes since the 1990s, partly because of the implementation of the EU Common Fisheries Policy. The Basque fishermen's reactions clearly illustrate the specific stakes and power game at play within the trade. The Prestige disaster occurred at a time of deep changes, if not destabilization, of the sectoral modes of regulation, thus straining relationships between Europe, nations and infra-national bodies. It led to a reorganization of the local institutional order. The management of the crisis also shed light on the paradoxical dimension of a fishing community caught in between solidarity and competitive localism, sectoral interests and environmental issues, unity of the milieu and internal fragmentation. It reopened debate over EU regulations in so far as two competing perceptions of Europeanization were revealed by this crisis — general awareness among professionals of the European dimension in environmental issues vs specific awareness of the EU's extensive regulatory framework for the fishing industry