I had written about this some months ago but now it seems to be coming up in a much more serious way. This story was in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

FRANKFURT, April 5 — An unusual law that shapes the oversight of German companies is again being re-examined after corruption scandals at Siemens and Volkswagen, even as more companies are finding ways to skirt it.

Under German law, companies are required to give as many as half of their supervisory board seats to labor representatives. That increasingly appears to lead to conflicts of interest and even to cases of bribery in corporate Germany, because executives need a supervisory board’s support to keep their jobs and carry out strategy.

The rest of the story makes it clear that the real reason companies are pushing for this is the mantra that German companies have to be more “globally competitive” and co-determination somehow harms that. Sure…