You show me any post I've made that's trolling?

Over to you.

*sigh*

Come on Minty, spill the beans, who was he?

No.

That would be in breech of data protection etc.

However, this ID is no more.

I didn't say they [ishould[/i get money too, did I? I asked why should any household that has an income of £300,00 get something and a household that a parent stays at home get nothing. {{Sigh}}

[url=http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/katie-hopkins/zero-hours-contracts_b_3704860.htmlAn endorsement of the benefits of zero hours contracts from Katie Hopkins[/url is sufficient reason to outlaw them totally

The vacuous Louise Mensch argument.

What you actually don't do is care about anyone but yourself.
You're "fine with that" as long as you don't pay more tax.

The ultimate Tory, happy as long as it doesn't affect you personally.

To quote from the deluded womans article ...

[iA zero hours contract reduces a number of employment provisions; notice periods and unfair dismissal can be avoided. Wages are driven down, pension and sickness benefits are limited.

Meanwhile the company can maintain an on call workforce that take nothing for granted and understand their next shift is dependent on their performance at their last.

I am always amazed by the resilience of my self employed colleagues: recognising they cannot take a holiday without paying the price, forever on call, always saying yes to work, working weekends, anti social hours, always charming, polite, gracious. [/i



A couple of points - I had my own business for 23 years, I employed staff, and after the business ceased trading I always said, and still say, that I would not employ another person in another venture, so some of this may seem hypocritical - so be it.

The attitude of the woman in the quote is simply rubbish and despite her self written Wiki article I cannot find any mention of what sort of business she is involved in, judging by the Wiki article she is a mouthpiece who seeks attention from morning TV chat shows by finding controversial subjects and being controversial on them - that isn't really a business, its earning money through being a tw*t on TV, but its not really a business and the fact that she then goes on to describe one of her "staff" as a self employed make-up artist who prepares her for TV interviews makes me think that actually, I don't think she she is anything like the "business woman" in the intro title block of her Guardian article - there is no business dear, its you trolling the media.


Given that, its pretty pointless reacting to her words, they were only generated for publicity and repeated by a media desperate for characters like her.

I think she probably missed a bit out, along the lines of "... [iand, whilst I obviously wouldn't do it myself, it's great for minions[/i ... "

Indeed.

If proof of income is required as it is for renting privately then yes they can't access that accommodation just as they can't get a mortgage. Where do they go then? The answer is obvious, local authority provided accommodation but that assumes they qualify in the first place over people with greater needs for a very small pool of social housing stock. They could be put up in a B&B by the council but that then increases the cost to the local authority so is a further drain on the council tax budget.



Then you ought to be able to work out something else has got to give which I mentioned in my previous post and alluded to above. The services you get will suffer. Freezing the council tax and taking less in income tax means cuts in services. You may not at this point have had to make use of any of the services affected be they local services or national services such as the NHS but you will one day. You will then probably complain they should be run privately only to find they already are and because they are, cost the councils and government even more from their ever diminishing budgets.

On the child care vouchers, when I've been to a lecture where a tax specialist explained how he and his wife (also works for their company, wink, wink) are using them to help pay for their children's private tuition fees, there's something wrong IMO.

This chimes in with what I've been thinking about these vouchers when given to people who can earn up to £150,000 each (so, potentially £300,00 per couple) receiving vouchers at 20% of the total cost, up to a maximum of £1,200 per child p.a.
At that end of the scale, it's a nanny subsidy, not a back-to-work incentive.

Unlike all you lefties on here who spout socialist values from your privileged ivory towers on your new mac book!!

Back to topic zero hour contracts are a very poor option, flexible labour is a much more positive way of addressing fluctuation in demand. Casual/agency work is no different, there are no guarantees, not sure why the likes of Mintball is not up in arms about this form of employment?

Casual or agency work is fundamentally different from zero hours contracts in one significant respect: the casual or agency worker is free to work for other employers or agencies.

I'm old enough to remember dockworkers pre-Devlin Report, when dock work was on a casual basis. Men were selected for a day's work from "The Pen". If they were not among the chosen ones, they didn't work and received no pay. They couldn't simply switch to another employer (there were over 1000 employers) for fear of being blacklisted. Corruption was rife, dockers were expected to pay for the beer of the gangers and foremen, it wasn't unusual for two men to physically fight over one available job for a day. All this happened right up to the mid-1960s, do we want to go back to that kind of savagery?

Zero hours contracts are masking the true state of employment/unemployment/underemployment in the UK. They may be advantageous to a small number of employees but in reality they allow employers to operate a labour force with no responsibility for sick-pay holiday-pay or maternity leave. Leaving business to reap the profits, offshore them to avoid tax and the taxpayer to pick up the slack.

One day you might attempt to engage with issues instead of simply flinging around old labels, which suggest that you don't really understand the current state of affairs in "the real world".



Because the two things are not one and the same.

I see flexible labour contracts in operation on every day of my working week in the various supermarkets that we deal with - while they use agencies and have no control over what contracts apply there (or more likely don't want to ask), in the main for their own staff they operate the 5/7 or 4/7 type shift regime where an employee has a guarantee of work and of their hours each week - a normal working contract in other words, the days of work can be switched at will but the hours are available and the shifts are part of the contract of employment.

That is flexible labour, not zero hour no commitment employers.


BTW, since last November my shift pattern, including standby weekend, has been 12/14, hence the reason why I have a massive backlog of holiday days to book before the end of the year, which probably won't be approved

A sizeable number of employers operate flexible working, usually with trade union approval Honda have managed it for years in the UK. During lulls in demand, workers would be sent home, often for a whole week at a time. then when demand increased once more, those workers would work extra hours each day or at weekends until the "free time" had been repaid. Similarly, workers could also accrue "free hours" to be taken at a later date. Since I stopped truck driving, every contract of employment I signed included a clause covering "contracted hours" and "a reasonable amount of overtime may be expected to be worked for no extra payment"

As you say, that's what flexible working is about

I did temping and thoroughly enjoyed it. The difference is I had a mortgage to pay and only accepted temping work that was for more than a week at a time instead of a day here, a day off there which is how zero hours could work out at. I also made sure when an assignment was coming to an end, I had something lined up for the following day/week, by which ever agency. (I was registered with a few). Temping is also a way into permanent work.

As it happens, I don't own [uanything[/u made by Apple.
But that's not really the issue ... you too are using the Louise Mensch argument, when she sweepingly included anyone who bought a coffee at Starbucks as "buying into everything capitalism provides" whilst at the same time protesting in St Paul's Churchyard as being hypocritical.
That's what we call polarised thinking, Sal.

If someone says that they are opposed to some issue of the capitalist world, they are (in your view, it seems) automatically a raving communist.
It doesn't work like that, there's a whole range of positions between the two extremes, and objecting to aspects of laissez-faire neoliberal economics does not make one a Stalinist.

Just to demonstrate the utter vacuousness of polarised thinking .. do you own anything made in China? ... it is, after all, still a Communist country and has built-up enormous reserves that unbalance the world's markets and balance of payments.
Surely a committed laissez-faire capitalist like you wouldn't buy into that?


If I may apply your style of polarisation to that comment, do you think, therefore, that everyone should be on zero-hours contracts ... and, if not, why not?
By the way, agency work varies quite widely, I personally worked as a self-employed contractor for 15 years, never once on a zero-hours contract, the contracts always included agreed likely length of contract, notice periods, hours per week, times of hours etc etc.

[url=http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/they-wont-be-lovin-it-mcdonalds-admits-90-of-employees-are-on-zerohours-contracts-without-guaranteed-work-or-a-stable-income-8747986.htmlMcDonalds has "82,800 contracted staff not guaranteed work or a stable income."[/url

They're lovin' it? I doubt it.

“[iThe zero-hours contracts which all our hourly-paid employees are on do not affect employee benefit entitlement and all of our employees are entitled to a range of benefits including life assurance, employee discounts and access to a range of training and qualifications.”[/i

No mention of sick pay, holidays, notice period, protection from unfair dismissal etc etc.
It could just a bad PR release but, basically, no mention of ANY employment rights at all.

I am sure its quite deliberate.

You'd think McDonalds managements reliance on zero hours contracts was possibly because they are just too incompetent to work out a staff rota for a business that must have a pretty predictable level of demand. It should be pretty easy for them to work out a base level of demand in each outlet, employ a core number of permanent staff to cover it and then employ temporary staff to cover any seasonal peaks.

However I doubt they are at all remotely incompetent and have worked out it is simply more profitable to employ staff on zero hours precisely because they don't have to provide sick pay, holiday pay or redundancy pay. They can also probably pay less per hour as well. A permanent employee would no doubt be looking for jobs paying more then the minimum wage whereas someone desperate for a few hours beholden to their employer will work for less.

It's not flexibility the likes of McDondald's and the IOD champion zero hours contracts for. It's because they cost less and result in larger profits at least in the short term (as usual ignoring long term planning and ignoring the benefits of a stable and contented workforce). It is just another expression of maximising shareholder return and hang the consequences. It's also a fine illustration of what unregulated capitalism leads to. Pretty much in the same way large companies have worked out they can avoid corporation tax this is just another wheeze dreamt up in the same vein to allow companies to dodge their financial and moral obligations.

I read that the EU was peed off at US corporations attempting to import US labour practises into the EU. High time Brussels told them (and all EU employers): you want to operate in the EU? You play by EU laws or not at all.

Brussels could then issue a warning to all member countries: Sort out the problem with zero-hours contracts or we'll do it for you.

That should get things stirred up

Which is the big spanner in the works of idiots like UKIP when they think we can opt out of the EU and its work related laws, be cheaper and then be allowed to undercut countries in the EU who have to abide by the regulations.