As this administration withers (lose
vitality, debilitarse), 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% in 2012, to at least
200,000, although there are likely to be far more, as many employees do not
understand the term; 23% 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.
This
is the natural progression of a free-market culture weighted, inexorably,
towards employers. Interns now have their own reality TV show, The Intern, so
their exploitation can at last be properly noted where it matters. In The
Intern they battle to meet that latterday unicorn, a
proper job; off-screen they work for nothing, in
situations that amount to fulltime jobs. Can indifference be measured in
viewing figures?
This
is destructive – it makes non-payment an acceptable
cultural norm, and it expels all but the children of the wealthy from creative
and lucrative professions. Who else can work for free?
But privilege will have privilege; you can now, if you
wish, buy yourself a seat at the weekly Vogue features conference. It is not a
fate I would wish for, but if you have £19,500 to spend on a one-year fashion
diploma at Soho's new Condé Nast College ,
which I like to call the University
of Chainmail Knickers
It
is thought that up to 13% of those working in care homes receive less than the
minimum wage; even so, there has not been a prosecution for non-compliance
since 2010. If you think Labour did any better, there are only eight
prosecutions on record during their tenure, and none at all until 2007. The
government is already preparing us for the capping, or reduction – or, I
suspect, the elimination of the minimum wage; they are rewriting the terms of
the Low Pay Commission, which sets the cap, insisting that, "the
understood and accepted goal [is] to raise the wages of the lowest paid without
damaging employment or the economy." This is the swish of a cape,
and chilling.
Elsewhere
we see working conditions that would disgust tyranny; to disguise it, workers
are obliged to act happy, as if they live in an internment camp run by the Mr
Men. Amazon's notorious warehouse in Rugeley, Staffordshire, obliges its
employees to pass through a scanner daily, like criminals, and measures their
productivity to the minute. (Until this is modified, I will boycott Amazon,
even if it advertises the Communist Manifesto on Kindle for £0.00. This is the
company that removed pirated copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm
from Kindle, so perhaps it has a sense of humour?) Even the Daily Mail was
appalled by the working conditions at Rugeley; Tesco's Donabate distribution
centre in Dublin likewise "tags" its workers – although not while
they are in the toilet, it insists – while Pret a Manger encourages its workers
to indulge in regular "high fives" and live
their long, low-paid days in a kind of quasi-religious, corporate
ecstasy; when you consider the highly stigmatised alternative, unemployment,
can you blame them?
The
Conservatives voted against the minimum wage in 1998, even if Cameron
later admitted it "turned out much much better than many people
expected". He was right – studies indicate that the minimum wage has
no impact on the job opportunities of the low paid – who would have
thought it? But they can always try again, under the forgiving cloak
of austerity.
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