Our labour market looks more and more like The Apprentice: sixteen people chasing after every fantasy job going
by Tanya Gold
As this [UK Conservative] administration withers, The Apprentice seems darker, more prescient and metaphorical — a television game show where the first prize is a job. With Alan Sugar. (And the second prize is? Oh, forget it.) Sugar has been a cartoon villain in Employment Law Land since his notorious pronouncement in the Daily Telegraph in 2008 on female employment rights — "These laws are counter-productive for women, that's the bottom line … You're not allowed to ask, so it's easy — just don't employ them … It will get harder to get a job as a woman".
He has beaten off his former Apprentice Stella English's constructive dismissal claim, which was brought on the odd — and entirely predictable — grounds that she was treated "like an overpaid lackey". Sugar says he's been cleared after a "derisory attempt to smear my name", his reputation is intact. I wouldn't go that far; even Theresa May thought his comments on women were appalling.
Is this a fair wind for employers who have a responsibility only to short-term profit? It seems so; under the hellfire rhetoric of triple-dip recession, workers' rights recede into myth as we race, ever faster, to the bottom. When profits rise, will rights be reinstated? Even now David Cameron is in Europe, seeking to pull us out of its progressive employment legislation.
Zero-hours contracts, a system of indenture where the worker is expected to be available even if no work is offered (or paid for), rose by 25 percent in 2012, to at least 200,000, although there are likely to be far more, as many employees do not understand the term; 23 percent of large British firms now use them. Zero-hours contracts are not for the traditionally wretched — the low paid in catering or caring or retail. Doctors, university lecturers and — ha! — journalists are now habitually on zero-hours contracts; the House of Lords is advertising for a zero-hours reporter for Hansard. (The closing date for the application is tomorrow.) The barbarians are inside the gates….
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