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BusinessDay www.businessday.co.za Wednesday 3 August 2022
INTERNATIONAL
Tory leader to face unions
US DRONE STRIKE
Zawahiri killed in ‘very safe place’
• Britain’s Rail, Maritime and Transport union warned country could be heading for first general strike since 1926 Therese Raphael
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t looks like the prize of winning the Conservative leadership election will be a bruising battle with Mick Lynch, the emerging face of organised labour in Britain. Amid yet more rail strikes last week and threats from front-runner Liz Truss to retaliate with new labour laws, Lynch, the leader of Britain’s Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union, warned that the country could be heading for the first “general strike” since 1926. The next Tory leader will face a combination of soaring inflation and labour unrest that’s not been seen since the 1970s. British workers planning or threatening walkouts include lawyers involved in criminal trials, teachers, junior doctors and nurses, and workers at Britain’s largest container port. Telecoms workers and postal workers have voted to strike. To make things messier, there has also been a walkout by waste-collection workers.
CARROT-AND-STICK
This is a high-stakes battle in both economic and political terms. If the Conservatives are to win the next election, they’ll need to find an approach to the strikes that convince a majority of workers (unionised and not) that the government has their interests at heart. That will mean not only the stick of legislation — ensuring minimum levels of service on critical infrastructure like railways in the event of a strike — but also some carrots, in the form of economic growth, productivity
improvements and the prospect of higher wages. Such legislative action would not be an attack on the fundamental right to strike, as Lynch claims. France, Italy, Spain and other countries have minimum service provisions, too, and workers still strike. Lynch has an interest in building a narrative of a country where the democratic right to withhold labour is under threat — that encourages other unions to join in the strike action. “What we’re seeing is not just disputes about terms and conditions, but the rise again of a political agenda,” says Richard Short, co-founder and director of Union Blue, a centre-right think-tank and pressure group rooted in the idea of moderate trade unionism. With a Tory Party that is in danger of losing its 2019 majority and a Labour Party that hasn’t capitalised on that disarray, he argues Lynch and some other union bosses see a vacuum they are trying to exploit, whether that serves their workers or not. For all the bluster, though, the threat of a general strike is overblown. A general strike refers to a large portion of the unionised workforce withholding labour to force concessions around pay or conditions. In 1926, about 3-million union members stopped work for nine days. Strikes during the original “winter of discontent” — in the autumn and winter of 19781979 — didn’t qualify. Nor is one likely to now. Even though Britain is more unionised than Germany,
Union building: Mick Lynch, secretary-general of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. /Reuters France, the US or Japan, it is nowhere near the levels of unionisation in the late 1970s. About 6.4-million UK employees — just over a fifth (23.1%) of the workforce — were union members in 2021, the lowest rate on record since 1995 and less than half of what it was in 1979. The majority of today’s unionised workers, however, are in the public sector, which gets to the heart of the problem for the next government. Not only are these workers facing deep structural changes (for example, remote work affecting travel) and crushing backlogs due to the pandemic, but the spike in living costs has
hit real wages hard. And all of that comes at a time when, relatively speaking, real wages had already been stagnant for over a decade and labour markets are exceptionally tight, notes Connor MacDonald, director of economic policy research at the think-tank Policy Exchange. Truss’s approach of channelling Tory hero Margaret Thatcher — who vastly curbed the strength of powerful unions — will appeal to the Tory members who vote for the next leader. It’s also unfinished business. Despite a 2019 manifesto pledge, it was only in June that Boris Johnson got
around to introducing a series of measures to limit unions’ ability to disrupt essential services. (Truss has promised to pass these laws in her first 30 days.) But if she wins the race to be prime minister, she’ll need more in her toolbox. Her plan to pay public servants differently depending on where they live (and extending that potentially to public sector pay more widely) has been mooted in the past. It’s a debate worth having, but it will put her on a collision course with unions. It also won’t deliver the scale of change she needs. Ultimately, Truss will need to find a way to deliver both better public services and real wage growth for those working in the public sector. That will take deep reforms to public services, something Johnson talked about (when Dominic Cummings was his adviser), but never managed. A change in how services are structured and managed will be more likely to succeed if it involves deep consultation with unions, who will need to accept that trade-offs are necessary.
PRAGMATIC APPROACH
In other words, the Tories need to stand up to the unions, but also make peace with them. That might seem counterintuitive, but this kind of pragmatism is rooted in the party’s past. It’s often forgotten that Thatcher, who was a member and proponent of the Conservative Trade Unionists (CTU), argued for moderate unionism and even encouraging Conservatives to be trade union officials. Though there is reflexive anti-unionism in parts
of the party, there has also been a rapprochement between Conservatives and unions over the years, too. David Cameron became the first Conservative to address the Trades Union Conference and appointed an envoy to help repair relations with the unions. In a 2012 paper, the Tory MP Robert Halfon urged Conservatives to lean into these roots, noting there are many millions more Tory voters among union members than there are party members and the two had many interests in common. Of course, there is always going to be a tension here. The right to withhold labour is only effective if there is the potential to cause some pain for employers. That’s why British Airways settled its dispute with check-in staff at Heathrow airport who wanted a 10% pay cut introduced during the pandemic reversed. And there are times when workers’ rights need enforcing. Indeed, when P&O Ferries laid off 800 workers without consultation and hired agency staff at well below the UK minimum wage in their place, the government responded to public outrage, tightening laws and getting P&O to compensate the workers. But the right to strike needs to be balanced against the interests of the broader community. The next Tory leader will have a vanishingly small window in which to win over public and private sector workers. Putting new limits on union actions will be the easy part. /Bloomberg
Agency Staff Al-Qaeda chief Ayman alZawahiri, who had a $25m US bounty on his head, survived years in Afghanistan’s rugged mountains, but his last months were spent in an upscale Kabul neighbourhood where top officials from the Taliban also live. US officials said Hellfire missiles from a US drone killed the 71-year-old when he came out on the balcony of a safe house in Kabul on Sunday morning. US President Joe Biden said no civilians were killed. The Taliban confirmed an air strike on a residential house in the Sherpoor area of Kabul, but said there were no casualties. Zawahiri moved to a “very safe place” in Kabul a few months after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August last year, a senior leader of the group told Reuters on Tuesday on the condition of anonymity. Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid condemned the drone strike and called it a violation of “international principles”. Two Taliban spokespeople did not respond to a Reuters request seeking details. Unverified pictures on social media of what was described as the target of the attack showed shattered windows of a pink building, its fences topped with rolls of barbed wire. The house appeared to be two to three storeys tall and ringed by trees. Sherpoor is a quiet, leafy part of Kabul with large houses, where former Afghan general and ethnic Uzbek strongman Abdul Rashid Dostum had lived, among other local dignitaries. Some houses have swimming pools in their attached gardens.
US and Nato embassies are a few kilometres away. A woman who lives in the neighbourhood said she and her family of nine moved to the saferoom of their house when she heard an explosion at the weekend. When she later went to the rooftop, she saw no commotion or chaos and assumed it was some rocket or bomb attack — not uncommon in Kabul. The senior Taliban leader said Zawahiri spent most of his time in the mountains of Helmand province’s Musa Qala district after the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001. He kept a low profile there, but went in and out of Pakistan’s border regions several times. Pakistan’s foreign office did not respond to questions about Zawahiri’s movements. In January 2006, CIA Predator drones fired missiles at a house in Damadola, a village in the Pakistani tribal region of Bajaur, in the belief that Zawahiri was visiting. He was not, but at least 18 villagers were killed. Other Taliban sources said the group gave the “highest-level security” to Zawahiri in Kabul, but he was largely inactive operationally and needed the Taliban’s permission to move. A police official said Sherpoor is Kabul’s “most safe and secure neighbourhood” and that the drone strike is a “great shock”. He said influential people from the former governments of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani built spacious houses in Sherpoor. Senior Taliban leaders and their families now live there. Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon, helped co-ordinate the 9/11 attacks in 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 people. /Reuters
INSIGHTS: MARSH
Cyber risk resilience ‘should be a priority’ Report finds •most businesses
are not equipped to deal with a cyberattack, writes Lynette Dicey
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recently published report finds that just 4% of business leaders in Africa and the Middle East are confident in their organisation’s ability to successfully deal with a cyberattack. The toll of almost three years of unrelenting workplace disruption, digital transformation and ransomware attacks means very few business leaders are confident in their organisation’s ability to manage cyber risks. This is according to a new report published by Marsh, a leading global insurance broker and risk advisor, and Microsoft. The report, entitled The Middle East & Africa State of Cyber Resilience, questioned more than 660 regional and global cyber risk decision makers and analysed how cyber risk is viewed by various functions and executives in leading organisations, including cybersecurity and IT, risk management and insurance, finance and executive leadership. According to the report, business leaders’ confidence in their organisations’ core cyber risk management capabilities — including the ability to understand/assess cyber threats, mitigate/prevent cyberattacks and manage/
Spiros Fatouros … when, not if. respond to cyberattacks – remains a major concern for the region’s business leaders — with more than 76% having no confidence in their own organisation’s cyber resilience. “It’s not about if you will get attacked, it’s a matter of when it will happen, which makes it all the more surprising that organisations continue to take a siloed approach rather than looking at the risk from an enterprise-wide perspective,” says Spiros Fatouros, CEO of Marsh Africa. Many organisations are still struggling to understand the risks posed by their vendors and digital supply chains as part of their cybersecurity strategies. More than half of respondents — 60% — said they have not conducted a risk assessment of their vendors or supply chains. A lack of adequate skills is one of the top barriers holding companies back from implementing more formal and rigorous risk assessment methods. Other findings included in the report are that more than a third of organisations (37%) admitted to not having any kind of cyber insurance in place even though it is a key element in managing cyber risk. This is despite a rapid increase in the
number of cyberattacks over the past few years and omnipresence of this risk. Microsoft, for example, says it receives 24-trillion security signals a day. More than half (54%) of the those organisations which had secured insurance acknowledged that doing so was accepted best practice within their business sector and had helped them adopt a more stringent and resilient approach to cyber risks. Some 75% recognised that insurance was an important part of any cyber risk management strategy. As cyber risks become increasingly pervasive across most organisations, successfully countering cyber threats needs to be an enterprise-wide goal, aimed at building cyber resilience across the firm, rather than singular investments in incident prevention or cyber defence, says Fatouros. Cyber risk management should be a shared responsibility with risk managers, chief financial officers, chief information security officers, executive leaders and their teams discussing key cyber risks and working together to identify, quantify and manage them. The research revealed that IT and cybersecurity professionals tend to be the decision makers for cyber incident management and cybersecurity tools and services with boards, CEOs and company presidents most likely
MORE THAN A THIRD OF ORGANISATIONS ADMITTED TO NOT HAVING ANY KIND OF CYBER INSURANCE IN PLACE
to see themselves as the ultimate decision makers on cyber insurance. While 90% of risk manager respondents said their company had a risk-incident response plan in place, only 60% of executive leaders said they had a plan in place. The report suggests that some of the low response among executives could possibly have to do with a lack of engagement with those responsible for cyber risk management than a lack of an actual plan. The report also revealed that there is broad consensus on the need to increase investments in cyber risk management resources and capabilities. Like most budgetary decisions, deciding where to invest can be a complicated, time-consuming matter. The report revealed that different roles and departments typically have varied plans and priorities for future investments. IT and cybersecurity respondents are more likely to plan increased spending on cybersecurity technology, less so for those in finance and procurement roles. Risk management and insurance leaders are more likely to anticipate greater spending on cyber insurance and on hiring more cybersecurity professionals, while those at board and CEO level are less likely to anticipate greater spending in these areas. Greater cross-enterprise communication can help the region’s businesses bridge the gaps that currently exist, boost confidence and better inform overall strategic decision making around cyber threats, said the report, adding that organisations that share their cyber risk expertise across the business are likely to find the task more effective and efficient.
Strengthening Cyber Risk Resilience ! " ! #
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