Grandpa:
Rjan:
…I meant combined EU WTD and employer’s greed with a low cost foreign workforce. Perhaps the transport industry needed regulating, but it also meant increased costs and no company takes a profit loss; they find ways to make others pay for it. Low wages is a perfect example.
I’m still not really following. Restrictions on working hours existed before the WTD. Informal expectations, collective agreements, and domestic regulations - at least one of which was often, in the past, more stringent than the WTD is. Even just to count the cost of overtime, bosses had to track the hours they were making workers perform.
If employers have broadly reasonable working patterns, they would not even need to concern themselves with the detail of the WTD. The employer who has half an hour for lunch in the middle of an 8 hour shift, and 5 weeks holiday a year (on top of bank holidays), doesn’t need to be closely counting anything under the WTD, because his normal practice embeds compliance.
If there were ad-hoc complaints, such as a worker who has kept meticulous records of every minute he has spent at work and says he was underpaid £20 a year holiday pay because he’s done an exceptional amount of overtime, could just be dealt with by an ad-hoc resolution out of petty cash.
It’s because employers want to keep meticulous records for their own entirely separate reasons, and push every aspect of pay and conditions right to the wire of the law (which were often formulated generously to employers in the first place so as to impose no burden on reasonable employers), that the swines of the industry become buried in paperwork and the complexity of compliance.
I have some bad news for you. Corbyn is a remainer, as was Cameron and May. This cuts across party politics. There is no need for a second referendum, or a ‘people’s vote’, we’ve already had one. Brexit wasn’t about leaving the EU on conditions of a deal, it was in or out. If we can get a deal that benefits the UK all well and good, but not just one that leaves us with one foot in the door on EU terms.
Cameron and May were declared Remainers.
Nobody however believes that Corbyn has had a damascene conversion in respect of his Euroscepticism.
Labour is Remain for two reasons. Firstly, the balance of views in the party, against which Corbyn is not in a position to unilaterally impose his own view. Secondly, nobody supports a Tory Brexit, because their motivations are utterly malign toward workers. The fact that workers could benefit from a Brexit, does not mean they will benefit from the Tory Hard Brexit supplemented by 5 more years of Tory domestic policy following Brexit, or even from a deal that Johnson could theoretically strike (followed by Tory domestic policy).
I’ve made clear that my attitude to Brexit changed since the referendum. My attitude to the Tories has not however changed.
If the EU introduced an open door policy that allowed the cheap import of foreign labour, how can it not be of benefit to the working class to close that border? How can a mass of minimum wage labour be good for British workers, because go into any transport warehouse and the whole lot are on £8.21 - £9ph. I passed my test in 1988 and I’ve recently had a class 1 job offered me at £10ph! I (not so politely) refused and the rate suddenly magically rose.
I’m not arguing with you on these issues. I agree with you.
To the new passed agency drivers I’d say this. Don’t let them exploit you. When they really need someone your hourly rate will rise. You put a lot of time, effort and cost into getting your licence and experienced or not, you have the same responsibilities as we ‘others.’ Your n/s side mirror cowling didn’t fall off accidently and that scrape down your trailer side didn’t appear by magic. You’ll make mistakes and get the experience, but don’t accept ‘apprentice’ rates for your basic skills.
Agreed. Part of the solution to this is that workers have to stop agreeing with the idea that only a minority deserve to have decent pay for special or unusual skills, or that a properly functioning meritocracy is one in which only a minority deserve excess whilst the rest sink into the mire.
Drivers all the time struggle to argue that their work is not as “unskilled” as the next man’s, that they have all these rules unlike the warehouseman, that their accident record is better than most, or that they have 30 years under their belts, all geared to arguing why they, unlike most others, should be on a basic decent wage.
Most people doing even the most routine and repetitive work have spent 10 years in school and more years on the job to be able to do it - for today’s kids, it’s often more like 15 or 20 years in school before they’ll let you be a “sandwich artist” (i.e. the same sort of work the women in Sayers were doing 30 years ago, probably then simply called a “cook” or a “baker”).
The reality is that if you’re getting out of bed and doing 40 hours a week or more, and have normal bills and responsibilities, that is already quite enough to justify that you deserve a decent wage for it now, and a pension later when you’re too old or worn out by ailments.