So far it has been a bad day and it looks like its not going to get any better. So here is a short musical interlude. 😉
The Delta Ladies in their swing incarnation playing A Train with Nick Newell a couple of years back at The Red Lion Isleworth, which is a jolly nice pub.
Well for me in my particular circumstances I can see that some zero hours contracts might work. However for most folk they are not a good thing and should not be used to replace more secure working arrangements.
Let’s not be sour. The bounceback in jobs during the current recovery has been staggering – exceeding all predictions. During the depths of the slump too, although things were dreadful, the UK shed far fewer posts than any of the macroeconomic models suggested. Whereas in the past there had been something close to a one-for-one proportional relation between lost jobs and lost output, for every three percentage points of GDP that disappeared after 2008, only 1% of jobs went up in smoke.
But let’s not be blinkered either. If there is reason to be cheerful in the quantity of jobs in a famously flexible labour market, there is reason to be fearful when it comes to the quality. Underemployment, perma-temping and the recasting of low-grade staffers as “self-employed” hires shorn of all rights were striking features of working life in the recession, and all trends that have been stubbornly slow to reverse in the recovery. That much is reaffirmed every month when the official labour market statistics appear. Nothing, however, sums up the pall of insecurity that has befallen so much of the workforce like zero-hours contracts. We can’t map the numbers over long years in this case, because – until recently – the arrangement was still so exotic that no proper figures were collated. Slowly but surely, however, the information gap is being filled and, in every new droplet of data, zero emerges as the number that keeps getting bigger.
At the dawn of the slump it was estimated that there were fewer than 200,000 “jobs” without guaranteed hours. Since then much has changed – the term “zero hours” has gained currency, definitions have changed, and new data sources have been tapped to tally up the individual workers affected, recognising that some will rely on multiple jobs. But through all the refinements and seasonal blips that might colour the figures, there has been only one trend. The Office for National Statistics reported on Wednesday that there were 1.8m zero-hour contracts, and 697,000 zero-hours workers, both numbers that have been climbing fast.
Not every no-strings contract represents exploitation, it’s true, but too many do. While there are a few professionals happy to put in a well-paid hour on an as-and-when-needed basis, the ONS confirmed that the real zero-hours boom is in pubs, hotels and restaurants, sectors where low pay is rampant. While some big zero-hours groups, such as students, may be content to avoid fixed weekly commitments, it is dismaying to learn that it is mostly women who are working with zero security. A sharp rise in zero-hours workers of two to five years’ standing confirms that this way of doing business is becoming not only more widespread but also more entrenched.
After much delay, the coalition talks about banning the most abusive contracts, which actually bar staff from seeking employment with anyone else while they hang around waiting for shifts that may not come their way. It may be a start, but it’s not enough. At the very least, zero-hours workers must be given – as Labour proposes – a right to demand steady hours after six months.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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We are all brought and paid for to a degree, I suppose.
For 160 years the Daily Telegraph has been as integral a part of British life as the long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer and cycling to evensong that John Major once invoked, while paraphrasing George Orwell. You may not have shared the paper’s politics, but it was widely respected for straight, accurate news reporting of the sort that is essential to any healthy democracy.
This week the paper’s integrity suffered something of a body blow when its highly respected former chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, published a devastating attack on the newspaper’s ethical standards. Mr Oborne detailed a pattern of behaviour in which, he said, stories had been suppressed, removed, downplayed, boosted or discouraged in order not to offend – or, alternately to please – advertisers and/or financial institutions. His decision to go public with his allegations was sparked by the minimal coverage devoted to last week’s revelations – widely reported in the UK and round the world – about HSBC’s part in creating and encouraging tax evasion mechanisms. Mr Oborne believes the story was downplayed because the company’s chief executive, Murdoch MacLennan, was anxious not to lose advertising revenue from the bank. This is a serious accusation, since Mr MacLennan told the Leveson inquiry on oath that neither he nor the paper’s owners played any part in editorial decisions.
If Mr Oborne’s claims are right, he is justified in saying that the HSBC coverage, or lack of it, amounts to a fraud on Telegraph readers. A number of senior executives and former editorial staff at the newspaper have, albeit anonymously, endorsed Mr Oborne’s general critique. The paper, normally an advocate of transparency, has so far declined to answer any detailed questions about Mr Oborne’s article. A long, dishonest and callow editorial on Friday almost comically attempted to shift the blame onto the BBC and the Guardian. You would never guess that the criticism – unreported in the Telegraph – actually came from neither of these sources, but from their own much-celebrated former colleague, who until recently was writing editorials.
Many news organisations, old and new, rely on advertising. Indeed, the noted historian of British newspapers, Francis Williams, described in his 1958 book, Dangerous Estate, how the daily press “would never have come into existence as a force in public and social life if it had not been for the need of men of commerce to advertise. Only through the growth of advertising did the press achieve independence”. But the reverse can also be true – as evidenced by widespread and dismal practices in the Indian press in which editorial coverage is routinely bought, and newspapers invest in companies about which they write.
The Telegraph, as a privately owned newspaper, is not obliged to respond to questions about its editorial standards. If it wants to put up shutters and throw mud at rivals, it’s perfectly entitled to do so. But, the longer it remains silent, the more its readers may draw their own conclusions about the integrity of a great British institution.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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This article titled “The Guardian view on zero-hours: the number that keeps getting bigger” was written by Editorial, for The Guardian on Wednesday 25th February 2015 20.07 UTC
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