No to zero hours contracts: action against Sports Direct
Unite the Resistance, a union-based campaigning group that seeks to raise opposition to austerity and its effects, will take action this weekend against Sports Direct.
Last week it emerged that the retailer employs 20,000 staff on zero hours terms[1]. Two days later the Guardian established that Buckingham Palace, the royal family’s London residence, hires workers using this method[2]. Thirteen local councils out of 32 in London are also using the contracts.[3]
Zero hours contracts mean workers have no guaranteed weekly hours or income, and are only being paid for the hours that they do work. Bosses use zero hours contracts to cut wages, and avoid holiday pay and pensions. Workers are also unable to take on other work, as they are obliged to be available for work at the whim of the employer. And with the high level of insecurity comes the risk of bullying, harassment and stress.
Zero hours contracts are on the rise having almost doubled in the last five years. The latest data shows some 208,000 people are now “employed” on zero hours contracts, and these figures underestimate the reality as many people do not know they are on them.
UtR joint national secretary Jane Aitchison says, “These contracts are a throwback to the casual employment of workers in Victorian Britain. They are a growing threat to workers’ rights. The gains that workers have made since the Second World War are being stripped away by the government and the profit-hungry employers. We need a big campaign backed by the trade unions to eliminate zero hours contracts and win secure jobs with decent pay.”
UtR will be holding protests at several Sports Direct stores:
London: Saturday, 3 August. 12 noon, Oxford Street: The Plaza, 116-128 Oxford Street, W1D 1LT. Youth Fight for Jobs have also called for people to protest at the Oxford Street site.
Birmingham: Saturday 3 August, 2pm, Sports Direct, opposite Indoor Market
Cambridge: Saturday 3 August, 11am, Lion Yard entrance St Andrews Street
For further details contact: UtR joint national secretary Jane Aitchison 07949 244380 or Sean Vernell 07951 803776, or Unite the Resistance on 07795 412932.
Click here to download placard
Click here to download leaflet
www.uniteresist.orghref="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/jul/28/sports-direct-staff-zero-hour-contracts http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-23520698http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/jul/30/buckingham-palace-zero-hours-contracts
Thursday, 1 August 2013
Radical or Compliant? Young Party Members in Britain
Radical or Compliant? Young Party Members in Britain
Lynn Bennie
School of Social Science
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen AB24 3QY
e-mail l.bennie@abdn.ac.uk
and
Andrew Russell
University of Manchester
Politics, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
Manchester, M13 9PL
email: andrew.russell@manchester.ac.uk
Paper prepared for Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (EPOP) Conference, University of Oxford, 7-9th September 2012
https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:177225&datastreamId=SUPPLEMENTARY-1.PDF
Wednesday, 31 July 2013
How much faith should we have in Cable's promise to be tough on blacklisting?
How much faith should we have in Cable's promise to be tough on blacklisting?
31 July 2013
Business Secretary Vince Cable has said the law will be tough on blacklisting if the practice is exposed at Crossrail, but how much faith should we have in his words?
"Blacklisting is an unacceptable and illegal practice and we take any allegations of blacklisting very seriously," the Guardian reported the Minister as saying. "Perpetrators can expect to feel the full force of the law".
If Cable was proposing that the multinational consortium in charge of Crossrail – Bam, Ferrovial and Kier (BFK) – would be charged with a criminal offence and all victims of blacklisting would be reasonably compensated, his words would be something to celebrate. But instead his promises ring hollow against a backdrop of Coalition denial of ongoing blacklisting in the construction industry, and its stubbornness that the law against the practice need not be strengthened. What's more, after Chairman of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee Ian Davidson wrote to him calling for an investigation into Crossrail, Cable's response was to delegate the matter to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) – the same organisation that raided The Consulting Association's (TCA) offices in 2009. Although the ICO was able to find huge amounts of evidence that TCA had blacklisted thousands of construction workers, many of whom were unable to work in the industry ever again, the most the 40+ companies involved suffered was a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, Chief Executive Officer of TCA Ian Kerr was fined £5,000 for breaking data protection laws, which he claims was paid by Sir Robert McAlpine.
The law has since been changed by the former Labour government, but as the Institute of Employment Rights (IER) highlighted at the time, the reforms did not go anywhere near far enough.
President of the IER Keith Ewing said: "No doubt driven by a desire not to offend big business, the government’s original proposals failed even to provide a right not to be blacklisted. Workers were expected to be pleased that there would be a right to recover compensation if they could prove that they had suffered loss as a result of having been blacklisted. There would be no automatic compensation for being blacklisted, and no criminal penalties."
"Blacklisting should be a criminal offence. Full stop," he argued.
The reforms also protected only those engaged in 'trade union activities', not 'trade union-related activities', leaving it up to the courts to decide what that means; as well as making virtually no changes to the law on vetting practices, and laying the burden of proof at the door of the worker who believes he has been blacklisted, rather than with the employer. With blacklisting known to be a very secretive practice, thus very difficult to prove, this is more than unhelpful to workers who are struggling to find any work at all.
Indeed, Ewing described the new reforms as "a law carefully constructed never to be used". So even if BFK was to receive the "full force of the law" as Cable promises, it will be barely feel it.
The Institute of Employment Rights believes that a guaranteed minimum amount of compensation should be provided to anyone who is found to have been blacklisted, and crucially that blacklisting must be made illegal. A public inquiry must be held to reveal the scale of blacklisting and to formulate ways to properly punish those who have been engaged in the practice, while providing a real disincentive to employers currently vetting their workers for trade union activity.
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