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Middle East Edition
19th January 2022
 
THE HOT STORY
Expat fee pushes one million foreigners from Saudi employment market
The introduction of an expat fee in 2018 has contributed to a total of 1.05 million foreign workers leaving the Saudi employment market. The figure represents just over 10% of the total number of foreign workers in the kingdom, according to monitoring by Okaz/Saudi Gazette based on government reports. The monthly expat fee was SR400 per employee in 2018 and it rose to SR600 in 2019 and has been SR800 since 2020. The number of non-Saudi workers totalled around 10.42 million at the end of 2017, but dropped to about 9.36 million by the end of the third quarter of 2021. Meanwhile, the total number of Saudi workers increased by 5.66% over the same period.  The increase of about 179,000 Saudi citizens in the workforce brought the total number of Saudi workers to 3.34 million, compared to 3.16 million at the end of 2017.
RETENTION
The top job attributes in the UAE
The three drivers of employee attraction in the UAE are salary and compensation (64%), workplace environment (61%) and long-term job security (50%), according to the Mena Talent Attraction and Retention 2022 survey by job site Bayt.com and data analytics firm YouGov. Meanwhile, seven in 10 respondents to the poll said they find an employer attractive if they follow good ethics and practices, two-thirds (67%) of respondents look for a friendly company culture, and almost half (49%) seek employers that engage in corporate social responsibilities. Ola Haddad, Director of Human Resources at Bayt.com said: “Our annual Talent Attraction and Retention survey demonstrates that a large number of UAE professionals hold their current workplace in high regard and would even recommend their employers to other job seekers. Organizations in the region should continue engaging their talent and seeking their feedback to improve their ability to attract top talent and to drive up their loyalty in 2022 and beyond.”
SUSTAINABILITY
BlackRock's Larry Fink wants companies to value more than profits
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has defended so-called ‘stakeholder capitalism’ in his annual letter to CEOs. The head of the world’s largest asset manager rejected suggestions that an investor focus on the interests of wider society rather than profit is “woke,” writing in his missive, entitled The Power of Capitalism, “It is not a social or ideological agenda . . . It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers and communities your company relies on to prosper.” He urged his fellow CEOs to find a purpose and to take into account issues like climate change as part of stakeholder capitalism. Fink also defended BlackRock's engagement with companies on carbon transition rather than divesting altogether, saying the companies themselves cannot be the "climate police" but instead should work with governments. "Divesting from entire sectors – or simply passing carbon-intensive assets from public markets to private markets – will not get the world to net zero," he said. "And BlackRock does not pursue divestment from oil and gas companies as a policy." Meanwhile, Fink said that companies can no longer expect employees to come to the office five days a week, neglect workers' mental health and keep wages low for those at the lower end of the income scale. "No relationship has been changed more by the pandemic than the one between employers and employees. CEOs face a profoundly different paradigm than we are used to," he wrote in his closely watched annual communication.
WORKFORCE
Full recovery of global labour market could take years, ILO says
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has warned that the recovery from the pandemic in the global job market is set to slow this year. The UN agency has forecast that the number of hours worked globally in 2022 would be 1.8% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2019, just before the onset of the pandemic, and there would be an even bigger deficit in working hours in 2022 than it had previously estimated. The ILO’s 2022 World Employment and Social Outlook trends report projects that the decline in global working hours this year would now be the equivalent of losing 52 million full-time jobs, nearly double the 26 million it previously forecast in May 2021. Guy Ryder, ILO director-general, described this “downside readjustment [as] quite considerable.” He said the spread of new Covid variants, such as Delta and Omicron, was among reasons behind the expected slowdown in the labour market recovery, and the ILO expected the recovery to remain weak through 2023.
Israel weighs expansion of work permits for Gazans
Israel is considering expanding the number of work permits for Gazans, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had told the World Economic Forum's virtual conference. The government last boosted the quota to 10,000 in October. “Through business, through economy, through jobs, it's the most sustainable way to bring stability,” Bennett said.
In defence of work
An FT editorial says jobs provide purpose and identity although the one-sided flexibility of the gig economy is not attractive and “more can definitely be done about bad jobs.”
TECHNOLOGY
Furhat has made a play for Misty
Swedish robot developer Furhat Robotics has acquired Colorado-based Misty Robotics to establish a U.S. base. Stockholm-headquartered Furhat, which has developed a social robot with human-like expressions that can converse with people autonomously using AI technology, will oversee a partial integration of ‘Furhat' and ‘Misty' features to enhance future social robots. Furhat has recently partnered with a Swedish recruitment firm to offer candidates job interviews performed by a robot that it is said is free from unconscious biases. “We know that in the next few years the robotics market will be worth billions, and service robots reflecting the best of human behaviour will be at the centre of it,” said Furhat chief executive and co-founder, Samer Al Moubaye.
REMUNERATION
Egypt raises minimum wage to $172 for public sector workers
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah El Sisi has issued a directive to raise the minimum wage from 2,400 Egyptian pounds to 2,700 Egyptian pounds ($172). The directive came during El Sisi's meeting with prime minister Mostafa Madbouly and other ministers to review the draft state budget for the fiscal year 2022/23.
STRATEGY
Syria joins China’s Belt and Road Initiative
Syria has joined the Belt and Road Initiative. The Syrian Arab News Agency reported that the initiative would “help open broad horizons of cooperation with China and a number of partner countries in the initiative in several areas, including the exchange of goods, technology and capital.” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad discussed the initiative with Chinese President Xi Jinping in November. The civil war that erupted in 2011 is thought to have caused at least $120bn of physical damage.
INTERNATIONAL
Microsoft hires law firm to review bias policies and sexual misconduct
Microsoft has hired law firm Arent Fox to review its sexual harassment and gender discrimination policies and practices in response to a shareholder proposal that passed at its latest annual meeting. The review will produce a transparency report with results of any sexual harassment investigations in recent years against the company's directors and senior executives, and will include a summary of the board's previous probe into allegations against company co-founder Bill Gates. “[Arent Fox] is experienced in these matters and has not previously been involved in representing Microsoft in employment matters, nor has it done a significant amount of work for the company in the past,” Microsoft said. The firm will report to the board and Microsoft management, which will prepare a plan to act on recommendations. After that, the board will provide a public report on the review, findings and management's plans to address them.
Trader unfairly fired for alleged market abuse gets his job back
JP Morgan trader Bradley Jones, who was unfairly dismissed for alleged historic market abuse, has been awarded £1.6m and his job back after he triumphed at an employment tribunal in London against the US lender. A judge ruled the bank changed its approach to a series of trades Jones made in 2016 because it wanted to appear to be “cleaning up its act.” Jones faced an investigation over trades that saw him enter and delete two 'sell' orders in quick succession, a practice otherwise known as “spoofing” and which triggered the bank's surveillance systems as potentially market abuse. Employment tribunal judge Stephen Knight said Jones had not in fact engaged in spoofing, which is used to give other traders a false impression of demand and was outlawed in the US in 2010. The tribunal said if Jones is re-engaged by JP Morgan by March 10th, 2022, he must be paid £1,588,489.87 in pay arrears. Jones has said he wants to be re-employed by the bank as soon as possible and would move to either London, New York or Hong Kong to work.
Taking office chair home is not a sacking offence, German labour court rules
A German labour court has ruled that taking an office chair home in a pandemic is not a sacking offence. The plaintiff - the legal adviser of the Catholic Archdiocese of Cologne - took the ergonomic office chair without asking after being told to work from home by her employer. The judge said that while it was a clear transgression, it was not one that justified her dismissal, and he deemed that the termination of her contract was unjust.  The attorney for the archdiocese had argued that the chair was an "object of considerable value" and that taking it was "illegal." The judge found that the necessary equipment had not been made available to employees when the archdiocese instructed staff to work from home in most circumstances early in 2020.
T Rowe Price’s Bill Stromberg on building the right culture
The FT speaks with Bill Stromberg, the former CEO of Baltimore-based asset manager T Rowe Price, about an “unusual” level of fatigue in the sector that has drawn attention to company culture.
OTHER
Super-rich call for tougher tax hit and fairer system
A group of 102 global millionaires and billionaires has called on governments to hit them with heftier taxes to help cover the costs of the pandemic, arguing that the current tax system is rigged in their favour and needs to be rewritten to make taxation fairer. In an open letter, they say: “We know that the current tax system is not fair . . . Most of us can say that, while the world has gone through an immense amount of suffering in the last two years, we have actually seen our wealth rise during the pandemic - yet few if any of us can honestly say that we pay our fair share in taxes." They have called for the introduction of "permanent wealth taxes on the richest to help reduce extreme inequality and raise revenue for sustained, long-term increases in public services.” The group says an annual wealth tax on those with fortunes of more than $5m could raise more than $2.52trn. The proposed tax would see those with more than $5m pay 2%, rising to 3% for those with more than $50m, with a 5% rate for billionaires. Calling for a heavier taxation hit, the super-rich signatories urged: “The world - every country in it - must demand the rich pay their fair share. Tax us, the rich, and tax us now."

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