Showing posts with label activist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label activist. Show all posts
Sunday 5 December 2021
Friday 4 June 2021
Why executives should always listen to unreasonable activists
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in The FT
When Christabel Pankhurst argued the case for women’s suffrage to members of the London Stock Exchange in 1909, the Financial Times reported that her address excited “a few remonstrative ‘Oh, ohs!’ [but] was punctuated throughout by genuine applause, as well as a good deal of merriment at her humorous sallies”.
After three years of failing to convert such applause into voting rights, however, the movement led by Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline adopted less amusing tactics, and the business pages’ view of it darkened. Arson attacks on post boxes in the City of London in 1912 left the FT fulminating about the need for “drastic measures . . . to protect the community as a whole from the mischievous intentions of a small and insubordinate section”.
Why dredge this history up now? Because today’s business leaders are being confronted by a new generation of agitators whose aims they consider unrealistic, whose methods they consider unreasonable but whose message will probably prove worth heeding in the long run.
This year’s annual meeting season has seen protests over executive pay at companies from AstraZeneca to GE. Nuns have harangued Amazon over its facial recognition technology and taken on Boeing over its lobbying. Diversity advocates have castigated boards for moving too slowly to achieve racial and — a century after the suffragettes — gender equality.
No subject has attracted more militancy of late, however, than companies’ contributions to climate change. And no clash has defined this shareholder spring more clearly than the revolt at ExxonMobil, in which Engine No 1, an activist investor with a minute stake and an aversion to fossil fuels, fought its way on to the $250bn oil major’s board.
“This is like the shot heard around the world,” says Robert Eccles, a Saïd Business School professor. Other companies and investors are realising that “if this little hedge fund can do this to ExxonMobil then, oh, things are different”.
Shareholders’ views of Big Oil were already shifting faster than Exxon had changed its business model, Eccles notes, but like Pankhurst’s troublemakers: “You needed the spark: they blew up the mailbox.”
Before Engine No 1, there was the civil disobedience of Extinction Rebellion, which has dumped fake coal outside Lloyd’s of London and blockaded News Corp printing sites in the past year. Environmental campaigners had targeted the offices of JPMorgan Chase in New York and BlackRock in Paris. And Greta Thunberg had shown up at the World Economic Forum last year and rubbished Davos-goers’ tree-planting incrementalism.
Such zealous tactics seem guaranteed to generate more irritation than applause. As Eccles puts it, “here are people who . . . don’t hold any of the cards. Unless you’re breaking the rules or using the rules really aggressively, as Engine No 1 did, you can’t get attention.”
That makes them easy to dismiss. People on both extremes of the fossil fuels debate “are a little nuts”, Warren Buffett told Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting last month.
Maybe, but from street style to fashions on Wall Street, new ideas tend to start on the fringes. The examples of the Pankhursts and successive campaigners for causes ranging from civil rights to gay rights suggest that the most powerful ideas become mainstream in the end.
That rarely happens overnight: it took until 1928 for British women to gain electoral equality with men. But today’s irritants can serve as harbingers of tomorrow’s consensus.
That should make them valuable to any company wanting to understand the risks and opportunities in the years ahead. Every CEO knows that society’s expectations of business are constantly changing, but few have worked out that their harshest critics might help them position themselves for those shifts.
Society’s expectations still matter most to boards when expressed through their shareholders’ votes, and the continued growth of socially conscious investing suggests that the agendas of provocateurs and portfolio managers are converging.
This week, for example, a UBS survey of rich investors found 90 per cent of them claimed that the pandemic had made them more determined to align their investments with their values.
That report again underscored how younger capitalists are driving this process: almost 80 per cent of investors under 50 said Covid-19 had made them want to make a bigger difference in the world, compared with just half of the over-50s. It is worth executives asking themselves which of those demographics they are spending more time with.
Exxon’s unreasonable activists showed it that the world had changed and it had not. The question for other companies is whether they can learn such lessons less painfully.
Does this mean that boards should bend to every crank who berates them at an annual meeting? No, but companies should avoid dismissing every critic as a crank, and study the agitators for early warning signs of what may become groundswells.
Executives love to talk about innovation and “first-mover advantage”. If they are serious, they should spend more time thinking about where today’s fringes suggest tomorrow’s mainstream will be. Sometimes a small and insubordinate section points the way for the community as a whole.
Wednesday 5 December 2012
Blacklisting is the scandal that now demands action
'Workers across Britain have been systematically and illegally forced into unemployment by some of the country's biggest companies.' Illustration by Matt Kenyon
As in the phone-hacking scandal, the evidence of illegality, surveillance and conspiracy is incontrovertible. In both cases, the number of victims already runs into thousands. And household names are deeply tied up in both controversies – though as targets in one and perpetrators in the other.
But when it comes to the blacklisting scandal, the damage can't only be measured in distress and invasion of privacy. Its impact has already been felt in years of enforced joblessness, millions of pounds in lost income, family and psychological breakdown, emigration and suicides.
It's now clear that workers across Britain have been systematically and illegally forced into unemployment for trade union activity – often on publicly funded projects and in collusion with the police and security services – by some of the country's biggest companies, using secret lists drawn up by corporate spying agencies.
Liberty has equated blacklisting with phone hacking, insisting that the "consequences for our democracy are just as grave". Keith Ewing, professor of public law at King's College London, calls it the "worst human rights abuse in relation to workers" in Britain in half a century.
But whereas David Cameron ordered a public inquiry into hacking, he rejected any investigation of blacklisting out of hand. And while a mainly anti-union media has largely ignored the scandal, all the signs are that it's continuing right now, in flagship public projects such as the £15bn Crossrail network across the south-east.
Thanks to leaks, tribunals, evidence to MPs and an information commissioner's raid, we now know that one of those private espionage outfits, the Consulting Association, had 3,213 names on its blacklist before it was shut down in 2009. Most were construction workers, based at sites from Clwyd to Croydon, but they also included environmental activists.
For an annual subscription of £3,500, 44 construction and outsourcing giants such as Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Sir Robert McAlpine and Wimpey paid £2.20 a shot for "intelligence" on the 40,000 names a year they ran past the association's database.
For that they could have access to such gems as "keeps extremely interesting company", "union activity", "brought in H&S issues", "politically motivated", "troublemaker", "recently seen at a leftwing meeting" and "girlfriend … involved in several marriages of convenience". Mostly, workers were branded "involved in dispute" or "company given details and not employed".
Through this covert power, building workers were driven on to the dole during a construction boom. Both Dave Smith, an engineer, and Steve Acheson, an electrician, were sacked from one major construction job after another after raising health and safety concerns (asbestos and lack of drying facilities) over a decade ago. They have never been able to work in the trade for more than a few weeks ever since.
Their cards had been marked by blacklisters. "Those people ruined my life," Acheson says. For some workers, they destroyed it. After hundreds involved in disputes on London's Jubilee line extension were blacklisted in 2000, at least two who were unable to find work committed suicide.
The Consulting Association, which used material the Information Commissioner's office said "could only be supplied by the police or security services", was fined £5,000 for breaching data protection law (paid by the Conservative donor Sir Robert McAlpine). Blacklisting was formally outlawed in 2010, but covert arrangements are by their nature difficult to expose.
Corporate managers who have been revealed to have been up to their necks in blacklisting are now running major publicly funded projects – including Crossrail and the Carillion-run PFI Great Western Hospital in Swindon – that are the focus of new blacklisting and bullying disputes.
Last week, Ian Kerr, the man who headed the Consulting Association, spoke in public for the first time, telling MPs there had been an "awful lot of discussion" between Crossrail contractors and his outfit, as well as those at the Olympic Park, Wembley stadium and other public construction projects. "Like it or not," he declared, blacklisting "will always be there".
Of course blacklisting isn't new. Throughout the cold war, the virulently rightwing Economic League ran a similar corporate espionage outfit, from where Kerr brought his database. And more recently civil servants, police and corporations have been shown to work hand in glove against climate change and other environmental activists.
Nor is blacklisting confined to construction, where unions still have real power. But in a deregulated economy – where union weakness has helped slash the share of wages in national income and an anti-union firm such as Starbucks can announce it's cutting staff benefits on the day it's in the public dock for tax dodging – this ugly corporate victimisation isn't just an outrage against civil liberties.
It's also a block on the revival of union organisation essential to turning the tide of inequality – and the defence of those paying the price of a failed economic model. Labour, which took 11 years to put its own ban on blacklisting into law out of deference to big business, now needs to commit to tougher rights at work. The scandal of corporate blacklisting doesn't just demand a public inquiry and compensation, but a real shift of direction on power in the workplace.
But when it comes to the blacklisting scandal, the damage can't only be measured in distress and invasion of privacy. Its impact has already been felt in years of enforced joblessness, millions of pounds in lost income, family and psychological breakdown, emigration and suicides.
It's now clear that workers across Britain have been systematically and illegally forced into unemployment for trade union activity – often on publicly funded projects and in collusion with the police and security services – by some of the country's biggest companies, using secret lists drawn up by corporate spying agencies.
Liberty has equated blacklisting with phone hacking, insisting that the "consequences for our democracy are just as grave". Keith Ewing, professor of public law at King's College London, calls it the "worst human rights abuse in relation to workers" in Britain in half a century.
But whereas David Cameron ordered a public inquiry into hacking, he rejected any investigation of blacklisting out of hand. And while a mainly anti-union media has largely ignored the scandal, all the signs are that it's continuing right now, in flagship public projects such as the £15bn Crossrail network across the south-east.
Thanks to leaks, tribunals, evidence to MPs and an information commissioner's raid, we now know that one of those private espionage outfits, the Consulting Association, had 3,213 names on its blacklist before it was shut down in 2009. Most were construction workers, based at sites from Clwyd to Croydon, but they also included environmental activists.
For an annual subscription of £3,500, 44 construction and outsourcing giants such as Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Sir Robert McAlpine and Wimpey paid £2.20 a shot for "intelligence" on the 40,000 names a year they ran past the association's database.
For that they could have access to such gems as "keeps extremely interesting company", "union activity", "brought in H&S issues", "politically motivated", "troublemaker", "recently seen at a leftwing meeting" and "girlfriend … involved in several marriages of convenience". Mostly, workers were branded "involved in dispute" or "company given details and not employed".
Through this covert power, building workers were driven on to the dole during a construction boom. Both Dave Smith, an engineer, and Steve Acheson, an electrician, were sacked from one major construction job after another after raising health and safety concerns (asbestos and lack of drying facilities) over a decade ago. They have never been able to work in the trade for more than a few weeks ever since.
Their cards had been marked by blacklisters. "Those people ruined my life," Acheson says. For some workers, they destroyed it. After hundreds involved in disputes on London's Jubilee line extension were blacklisted in 2000, at least two who were unable to find work committed suicide.
The Consulting Association, which used material the Information Commissioner's office said "could only be supplied by the police or security services", was fined £5,000 for breaching data protection law (paid by the Conservative donor Sir Robert McAlpine). Blacklisting was formally outlawed in 2010, but covert arrangements are by their nature difficult to expose.
Corporate managers who have been revealed to have been up to their necks in blacklisting are now running major publicly funded projects – including Crossrail and the Carillion-run PFI Great Western Hospital in Swindon – that are the focus of new blacklisting and bullying disputes.
Last week, Ian Kerr, the man who headed the Consulting Association, spoke in public for the first time, telling MPs there had been an "awful lot of discussion" between Crossrail contractors and his outfit, as well as those at the Olympic Park, Wembley stadium and other public construction projects. "Like it or not," he declared, blacklisting "will always be there".
Of course blacklisting isn't new. Throughout the cold war, the virulently rightwing Economic League ran a similar corporate espionage outfit, from where Kerr brought his database. And more recently civil servants, police and corporations have been shown to work hand in glove against climate change and other environmental activists.
Nor is blacklisting confined to construction, where unions still have real power. But in a deregulated economy – where union weakness has helped slash the share of wages in national income and an anti-union firm such as Starbucks can announce it's cutting staff benefits on the day it's in the public dock for tax dodging – this ugly corporate victimisation isn't just an outrage against civil liberties.
It's also a block on the revival of union organisation essential to turning the tide of inequality – and the defence of those paying the price of a failed economic model. Labour, which took 11 years to put its own ban on blacklisting into law out of deference to big business, now needs to commit to tougher rights at work. The scandal of corporate blacklisting doesn't just demand a public inquiry and compensation, but a real shift of direction on power in the workplace.
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