Viviane Reding
There will be a touch of Parisian glamour at the Commission’s stuffy Berlaymont headquarters today as LVMH, the French luxury titan, drops in to chat business and gender with justice commissioner Viviane Reding.
The holding company behind Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton will publicly sign a Commission pledge to include at least 40 per cent women on its supervisory board by 2020.
Behind the effortless elegance of this afternoon’s event, a hard-nosed political battle on corporate regulation is unfolding.
Boardroom gender equality is gearing to be a big issue for Reding, who in Brussels is still best known for her popular crusade as telecoms commissioner to get mobile phone roaming fees down to nearly reasonable levels.
She’s following the same three-step plan in the boardroom battle dossier as she did in roaming: loudly complain that something must be done, warn industry to self-regulate or face EU law, and finally regulate when no progress is made.
LVMH’s visit is part of the self-regulation step. In March, Reding publicly challenged large companies to sign up to gender equality on a voluntary basis, even coming up with a pro-forma pledge card corporate bigwigs could sign and send back. (So far, it’s been a bit of a dud: only six companies have opted in, most of them SMEs with a handful of employees.)
So it’s no surprise that LVMH will get the red carpet VIP treatment when it sends Chantal Gaemperle, its head of human resources – and the only woman in the company’s 16-strong executive committee – becomes the pledge’s seventh signatory.
A press conference may seem over the top for an announcement which will have no tangible impact: to wit, under a French law passed at the start of this year, LVMH will be forced to have at least 40 per cent women on its board by 2017 at the latest – three years earlier than the Reding plan.
Aides to Reding concede this point. But they say the event will help “raise the profile of the issue”. They also say their pledge foresees a moderately faster phasing in of quotas, with a 30 per cent target by 2015, compared to 20 per cent by 2014 for the French law. LVMH might also impose gender targets lower down its corporate ladder.
More high-level signatories are promised in the coming days and weeks. But officials or diplomats dealing with this dossier are under no illusion that Reding’s team will be satisfied with the outcome, regardless of LVMH’s efforts. The consensus is that self-regulation will have been deemed to have failed by next spring, at which point a legislative proposal will be unveiled, just as in the mobile phone roaming dossier. To provide political backing, the European Parliament has already weighed in saying EU regulation would be just the thing.
The journey from proposal to EU law will be tricky, though. Matters of discrimination and labour regulation typically require unanimous approval from all 27 member states, a testament to how politically sensitive they can be domestically.
Even if the Commission were to find a way to propose this under normal EU legislative procedure – and constitutional lawyers are split on whether or not this is possible – it will still require a large majority of member states.
Yet an informal straw poll of national diplomats carried out by Brussels Blog suggests that will be difficult. Though everyone is waiting to see what Reding’s proposal looks like when it emerges, there is little appetite for a compulsory EU law.
Some governments dislike the idea of quotas at all. Others might favour them, but at national level, and don’t want Brussels to meddle in dossiers that have no obvious European element. Some (Britain) dislike quotas and EU laws. Finally, France probably doesn’t want to hand Viviane Reding a political victory after she excoriated them publicly over the deportation of Roma last year.
That leaves an uphill climb for Reding, perhaps an insurmountable one. Diplomats are already suggesting she will have to water down the proposals, perhaps by making them voluntary.
But male-dominated board rooms should be warned: few, if any, thought she’d manage to get mobile roaming through in 2007, such was the opposition from some member states and fellow Commissioners amid fierce industry lobbying. Yet deft political handling turned what seemed like almost certain political defeat into one of the most tangible achievements of Barroso’s first Commission.
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