Failing to stamp out bogus self-employment can be added to the embarrassingly lengthy list of missed opportunities during the 13 years when the Labour Party had the power to change Britain instead of shouting from the sidelines.
Listening at the Trades Union Congress in Manchester to the grotesque abuses suffered by workers – all effectively employees without rights, because money-grabbing firms designated them
self-employed – was heartbreaking.
There are cab drivers who are forced to wear company ties and sit behind the wheel of company cars and work upwards of the 70 hours per week demanded by the company, yet they are not classed as employees so paid holidays and sickness are out of the window.
There’s the building worker who fell from scaffolding, doctors using him as a living body to teach medical students because the severing of every tendon in his shoulders was the worst injury of its kind, and the firm didn’t want to know, leaving him without sick pay and no job when he’d recovered because they wouldn’t take him back on.
And there’s the landlady whose dream of running a pub turned into a nightmare when the £120,000 she invested became a financial shackle, the pub company which owns the hostelry dictating everything from the insurance on the building (bought from them) to maintenance (their contractor) and the price of beer (sold to her way over brewery rates at £2.70 a pint). She is treated as an employee in every conceivable way until it comes to wages and employment conditions when she suddenly becomes a stranger.
Bogus self-employment is even taking off in the cockpits of airlines, with pilots taken off the books and in one case required to supply a substitute aviator if they cannot fly a shift. The mind boggles over who might be sneaked up front to pull the throttle back, should a pilot discover he or she is unable to pitch up to fly a plane full of elderly holidaymakers to Benidorm.
The public purse is short-changed by bogus self-employment as well as the mistreated workers, with employers dodging National Insurance contributing less to fund services. Calculating the bill is virtually impossible but when the construction sector alone has 500,000 workers who are designated as self-employed when they’re clearly employees the total will fun into tens of millions of pounds and possibly hundreds of millions.
Alan Ritchie, general secretary of construction union UCATT, is running a strong offensive against rogue firms and the GMB is using its trademark flair to hound despicable bosses. Two of my colleagues on the Daily Mirror, Nick Sommerlad and Andrew Penman, who produce a weekly investigations column, have launched a “Gizza Proper Job” campaign to highlight abuses.
I suspect the prospect of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition doing what Labour didn’t and closing loopholes is slim, the Con-Dem Government seemingly intent on making the past 13 years appear a triumph of socialism by unleashing an orgy of cuts and a privatisation craze. The employers’ organisations which lobbied Labour to a standstill will be applying the same pressure to a Con-Dem regime ideologically committed to flexible labour markets, the bogus self-employed being the ultimate in disposable labour for profit hungry firms.
So the goal is to secure a solid commitment from the next leader of the Labour Party to end the scandal. In simple electoral terms, there are more votes in promising fairness at work to exploited workers than appeasing greedy exploiters. Labour landed on the wrong side of the argument in the past. Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself. A left-of-centre party which turns its back on fairness doesn’t deserve to succeed. And the victims of bogus self-employment deserve better.
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TUC general secretary Brendan Barber took a punt inviting Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, to the TUC Congress in Manchester. The official guide attempts to soften up the delegates, reminding brothers and sisters that Comrade King was one of the 364 economists who signed a letter attacking then Chancellor Geoffrey Howe’s spending slashing 1981 Budget and quoting the man himself saying: “I am the first Bank of England governor not to have been privately educated.”
He is, of course, also the Bank of England governor who was asleep on the job and slow to reduce interest rates when the recession was brewing. And Comrade King then saw which way the wind was blowing politically and sided with the Con-Dems on cutting spending.
I’m writing this at the TUC the day before Comrade King appears and you’ll know by now whether he was greeted with a shrug or a howl. But I hope the delegates weren’t too rude to him. Inviting David Cameron to speak was a step too far by Barber, a meeting between the Prime Minister and the TUC general council more appropriate. Unions which worry they’ll be isolated by the Con-Dems, however, cannot afford to cold shoulder the governor of the Bank of England. Whether they like what he says or not.
