As the FT has noted this morning:
Worker protections enshrined in EU law – including the 48-hour week – would be ripped up under plans being drawn up by the government as part of a post-Brexit overhaul of UK labour markets.
They noted:
The package of deregulatory measures is being put together by the UK's business department with the approval of Downing Street, according to people familiar with the matter. It has not yet been agreed by ministers – or put to the cabinet – but select business leaders have been sounded out on the plan.
And they could not resist this:
The proposed shake-up of regulations from the “working time directive” will delight many Tory MPs but is likely to spark outrage among Britain's trade union leaders.
But it's the detail that matters:
The main areas of focus are on ending the 48-hour working week, tweaking the rules around rest breaks at work and not including overtime pay when calculating some holiday pay entitlements, said people familiar with the plans.
But, trust me, that reference to holiday pay is a complete red herring, although the FT report gives no hint that anyone seems to have noticed this as yet. The real agenda is hidden in this paragraph:
The government also wants to remove the requirement of businesses to log the detailed, daily reporting of working hours, saving an estimated £1bn.
The idea that £1 billion will be saved for this reason is, of course, completely ludicrous. Time recording dies not happen in most businesses. When it does it is required for other purposes, and will not end with any change of regulation. So that is not the reason for this change.
Instead the reason for the change is to gut minimum wage rules. Once hours do not officially have to be recorded the means to check whether the minimum wage is being paid, or not, disappears. And so this proposed change is a deliberate way to reopen the path to low paid employee exploitation.
Tory philosophy has always been to promote wealth on the back of exploitation, most of it apparent and in plain sight. That is what is being facilitated here. The tiger never changed its stripes. It just hated the fact that the EU made it hide them for a while. Now it wants its old ways revived.
As I expected, Brexit is bad news for everyone but the very wealthy in the UK.
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If the below is true:
“The idea that £1 billion will be saved for this reason is, of course, completely ludicrous. Time recording dies not happen in most businesses. When it does it is required for other purposes..”
then surely this is applicable today also?
“Instead the reason fir the change is to gut minimum wage rules. Once hours do not officially have to be recorded the means to check whether the minimum wage is being paid, or not, disappears”
They seem to be completely contradictory statements. If time recording doesnt happen today then what prevents less than minimum wage being paid in those situations?
Not at all
Of course companies will keep time records fir their own use
But if not statutorily required to do so then they will ne be accessible for minimum wage checking
So, completely coherent claim
The anecdotal evidence is that EU seasonal workers and other workers in clothing sweatshops are paid less than minimum wage by having to actually work for much longer than appears on their pay slips.
These workers need effective trade union representation and not arbitrary rules which are widely ignored.
This can only work if the workers are placed in the equation as an economic variable (Marx angle here) ….two ways here, either by paying very low and recovering production from low wage countries or increasing the unemployment rate while providing this mass with just enough to support internal consumption and consequently economic turn over and fiscal comfort from VAT (let the dollar circulate as Billy Paul sang). France chooses the second option but the result is no recovery of manufacturing or production …. if the UK takes the first route then they are depriving the rich of the poor consumption…. and there are many more poor than rich ….. if this is the case then B Johnson is playing the role of Mr Bumble and doing it vert well…. the the UK citizens don’t see that they are being eased into a Dickensien future then they have learned nothing from brexit
So, as times get hard (artificially so because of project fear about Government spending), Government instead will help business by bearing down once again on the workforce.
How long will it take for people to stop voting for politicians who hurt them?
Mind you, looking at Labour, they are no better. They ended final salary pensions in the public sector in 2003. Not much of a choice is it?
Wow! that did not take long, Two weeks in and we see the the real agenda. Shocking.
It will be interesting to see whether Labour will rescind this abolition of the working time directives (assuming this will happen and the unions and TUC do nothing). Don’t hold your breath as Blair and Brown did nothing to restore workers rights after the the massacre of them by Thatcher in the 1980s
It is not just the UK.
The FT covered the meat processing industry in Germany last weekend :
“Inside Germany’s abattoirs: the human cost of cheap meat”
The Trick is to subcontract labour to intermediaries who turn a blind eye to the rules and regulations.
Health and Social Care are about to be sub-contracted using output based contracts ie no standards of input and only the very vaguest definition of output i.e. Population based KPI’s.
The Labour Party should be piling in but its going along with it.
Not because they agree with it but because they get money from the people who are leading the process.
As Robin McAlpine says you cannot compromise on integrity.
“Time recording dies not happen” should be “Time recording does not happen”, I believe.
Indeed
It is is a problem of typing in an iPad – I tend to hit too far to the left on o and i and spell checks do not reveal it
It will be interesting to see which faction wins out in the Tory party. The traditionalists who will take every opportunity to get one over on their traditional class foes.
Or maybe the newer breed of more English nationalist Tories who recognise the importance of keeping the red wall voters on board.
My money would be on the latter. I expect they will become more like the NI unionists. A party of the right but with an understanding they need to look after their working class vote.
But I could be wrong!
I am now retired
However my working life was in
Engineering , we had piece work
Work study , overtime was discretionary, temporary contracts
Flexibility on who did what.
I was glad to retire , we did not
Trust the management to be
Fair health and safety did not exist.