Kick G4S out of ethical index
FOR a FTSE 250 company to be blacklisted by Norway’s sovereign wealth fund because of the risk it has contributed to the ill treatment of migrant workers in Qatar and the UAE is truly shameful.
So why on earth is G4S allowed in the FTSE4Good index, which is supposed to include firms with strong environmental, social and governance practices?
G4S boasts about its membership in the index for the third year running. This is mystifying. Workers are alleged to be trapped in debt bondage and made to work long days with no overtime pay. A company facing such accusations has no place in a socially responsible share index overseen by FTSE Russell, which is part of the London Stock Exchange.
It is difficult for a global business like G4S to supervise its vast workforce, which is deployed around the world including in countries where customs and practices are very different from the UK or Norway.
But being a London-listed company comes with responsibilities. If proven, these allegations will besmirch not only G4S but the London market. This is not the only scandal it has suffered. Profits plunged last year because it had to compensate staff in the US for missing out on rest and meal breaks. It was stripped of a contract to run Birmingham prison after an inspection found terrible living conditions, drug use and violence.
So much for social responsibility. As for governance, the £386,000-a-year chairman is former Deloitte bigwig John Connolly. He has enjoyed a lucrative boardroom career for many years, despite having been reprimanded by watchdogs for his role in the Barlow Clowes savings affair, which was one of the worst debacles of the late-1980s.
G4S should voluntarily give up its membership of FTSE4Good unless – and until – it clears its name in the Norway affair, and if it doesn’t the index compilers should throw it out. As for Connolly, he should do the honourable thing and resign.
Right to know
AMONG its many other promises, Labour says it will eradicate the gender pay gap by 2030 if it wins the election.
Good luck with that. The Fawcett Society reckons that from yesterday until the end of this year, women are working for free because of the gender pay gap.
There are disputes over how the figures are calculated and how meaningful they are. Fair pay is not always the same thing as equal pay. But there is no shortage of cases where the gap between male and female rewards looks indefensible, including the recent Stacey Macken case at City bank BNP Paribas.
Miss Macken won a tribunal in December after finding out she was being paid 35pc less than a male counterpart in salary and that he was paid seven times as much in bonuses. The disparity was so shocking it sparked an #MeTooPay campaign, led by former Royal Mail boss Moya Greene and backed by GSK chief executive Emma Walmsley and Minouche Shafik, who is tipped to be the first woman governor of the Bank of England.
But this isn’t a ‘women’s issue’. When female workers are paid less than they are worth, whole families – men and children included – are worse off.
Discrimination may not be as blatant as it was in the 1970s but it has morphed into something more slippery and subjective, sometimes unconscious.
Women are not valued as highly as men for reasons that are hard to pin down and rarely spelled out. Men are seen as stars, as having more gravitas, whereas even very senior women are routinely dismissed as ‘lightweights,’ however preposterous that is.
The core difficulty, however, is the culture of secrecy surrounding salaries, which means no one – and there are undoubtedly some underpaid men too – knows whether they are on a fair deal. Stripping individuals of their privacy and making them reveal their pay packets, as happened at the BBC, is invasive and embarrassing. But making available anonymised data, perhaps in bands according to seniority, would allow employees to see how they compare with their peer group. Without more transparency, we will never have fair pay. Early Christmas
WHEN the going gets tough, the tough are no longer going shopping. The latest figures suggest people have lost their appetite for retail therapy. A December election isn’t helping the mood. Department stores bucked the quarterly trend but only because they brought forward their seasonal product lines to very early in November. If you thought Christmas started earlier than ever this year, you’re right.