‘My Hermes courier has just called to collect at 16:31. His usual daily 80 to 100 deliveries have increased to nearly 200 already. And this is in the countryside, not in a tightly packed urban area. He was just over halfway through his workload, and he had been out since 9am’. This is a report from a bookseller who needs regular collections and deliveries.
Vera, a Lithuanian woman with a university degree, works at a certain luxury fashion retailer, but is on a zero-hours contract and is only told whether she should come to work or not a couple of days in advance. She has to make up the pay gap by doing housecleaning.
Kevin is a writer and editor who works for a small publisher. He is hired and paid on a daily rate. His employer claims that he is not in permanent employment and that he has no entitlement to holiday or sick pay. He is able to improve his meagre wage packet by working as a sub-editor for a national Sunday paper at the weekends.
These are just a few examples of the way people work in the 21st century in London, where house prices average £500,000 and in what the government claims is increasing employment. The Tories, if re-elected, have announced that they intend to cut public sector jobs to the bone, claiming that the ‘private sector’ will take up slack. Since this is the way the private sector operates wages are likely to fall even further.
Anyone who is currently employed, including people who are ‘freelance’ in name only, or get paid on a day rate, for instance, as is the case with those working in many of the creative industries, has felt the deterioration in working conditions over the past five years.
It is strange that George Osborne seems incapable of making a connection between Britain falling ever more heavily into debt than forecast because tax revenues are down and the fact that tax revenues are down because fewer and fewer people are earning a living wage. It does not take a genius to figure out that if zero-hours contracts and day-labouring of people working in a full-time job were made illegal, there would be less need for foodbanks and HMRC would be able to fill itself up to the benefit of the whole country.
There was a time when the Inland Revenue cracked down on the tricks used by employers to evade their responsibilities to staff by ensuring that anyone who worked in a set location with regular hours, even on a part-time basis, would be considered as an employee, so that the employer and employee would make a full tax contribution. Apparently this is no longer the case. HMRC is thus colluding with the government to drive down pay and drive the country deeper into debt, misery and poverty.
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Josephine Bacon is a member of Progress
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