Re: Politicians do not "get" IT.
"Creating a shopping list for corporate spies?"
All of this information already exists in only two or three locations on the company's systems, so putting it into a single place doesn't really increase your exposure to electronic snooping by any worthwhile amount. If you were snooping a corporate network your key targets would be electronic access rights of the PA's to the CEO, finance director, head of strategy, head of legal, head of operations, head of sales (or their team's shared directories). That's five or six people who's email traffic will tell you everything important that is happening in a company. And that assumes you want all of that - a competitor might be happy with just two or three of those.
And of the information that the French want the employees to have, does that actually matter? Most big companies are routinely passing most of this info around anyway to third parties - so salary info is routinely shared with "remuneration consultants" or with recruiters, summary but often significant personnel analysis is often available in the group's public personnel report. The company's strategy and performance will be shared in the UK with the employee pension scheme representatives and external fund managers because they enjoy a preferential creditor status (I spent a month last year working on an update for our employee reps on the company pension scheme, so arguably the French are just moving into line with what we already do, albeit for different reasons). If you're a company looking for money in the bond markets then the banks (always leaky as hell) will want to look down the company's trousers in some detail.
And the actual information (eg on strategy) is something you have to share with a lot of people in the business anyway, with only relatively minor redaction. If you are selling a company the deal room open to potentially hundreds of people will contain all the salary strategy detail, customer lists, key contracts, terms etc. If you take the time to look there's a huge amount of information already publicly available to investors on strategy and performance. Admittedly they don't see anything other than director's salaries and group salary averages.
So I don't think this actually matters. To be compliant the company just cross out the title "investor presentation", and write "employee co-determination presentation", and append a list of carefully redacted salary detail that can't be traced to individuals. What's the value of telling the employees what the average salary of a middle manager is, or of the senior manager group? You can guess that from job adverts and industry norms.