Rolls-Royce to hold annual meeting for workers
Rolls-Royce will hold its first-ever annual meeting for staff in May in an attempt to improve communication with its 50,000-strong global workforce. The move follows a bribery scandal which resulted in a £671m ($816m) settlement and a year which saw the company’s largest recorded losses of £4.6bn. The meeting will take place in Derby in the UK and the firm's board will answer questions on a range of topics. Workers will need to apply to attend the meeting.

Rolls-Royce, the engine maker hit by a £671m settlement of bribery and corruption charges, is to hold its first annual meeting for staff with the aim of improving communication with its global workforce of almost 50,000.

The annual meeting will be held in May in Derby, England, where the company has 14,000 staff. The board will take questions on a variety of topics after a year in which the fraud charges and sterling’s plunge drove the company to a loss of £4.6bn, the biggest in its history.



Employee access to the boardroom at major companies has been on the agenda since Theresa May, the prime minister, raised the idea of putting workers on boards, although a green paper published last year stepped back from demanding this.

Rolls-Royce is not committing to appoint a worker to its board in the way that the transport group First Group has done. The embattled retailer Sports Direct last week said it would allow a worker representative to attend its board meetings but was accused by the union Unite of conducting little more than a “PR exercise”.

Rolls-Royce workers will have to apply for a place to attend the employee AGM, which seems likely to take place in the same venue as its shareholder meeting in Pride Park, home of Derby County football team. Those employees who own shares are already able to attend the shareholder AGM on 4 May.

The process is being overseen by the former HSBC banker Irene Dorner, who is a non-executive director at Rolls-Royce, and the logistics are yet to be finalised. It is not clear if staff outside the UK will attend and plans are being made to video the event.

Rolls-Royce revealed the employee AGM in its annual report published last week. Its chair, Ian Davis, said: “We note with interest the government’s green paper on UK corporate governance. The board is considering the level of interaction with stakeholders, particularly employees. We are planning to hold an ‘AGM for employees’ in 2017, and Irene Dorner will take the lead at looking at how we can strengthen our links between the boardroom and our employees.”



Warren East, the Rolls-Royce chief executive who was paid £2m for 2016, has been a supporter of greater worker representation, using the example of its experience in Germany, where the company has 20% of its staff and where workers on boards are commonplace.

The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said: “We welcome companies looking at ways to improve employee engagement. Rather than simply strengthening links between workers and the boardroom, we need worker seats in the boardroom – as the prime minister promised.

“It’s a tried, tested and successful approach in many other European countries. And it would improve the quality of decision-making in British boardrooms.”