ON Wednesday night TV viewers were treated to a film clip on the news of the managing director of Sports Direct, Mike Ashley, pulling from his pockets a huge wad of £50 notes while being filmed going through one of his company’s notorious ‘security’ procedures.
When asked why he carried so much cash, Ashley replied that he had been to a casino.
Not that the multi-billionaire Ashley made his fortune gambling. He made it off of the backs of workers on virtual slave conditions of work that a report by a committee of MPs likened to those of a ‘Victorian workhouse’.
The basis of Ashley’s wealth is his reliance on zero-hours contracts for the workers, a modern day form of slave labour exploitation. While Ashley may be the most reviled for the regime of zero-hours contracts, he is not alone. The use of these contracts is expanding as the bosses desperately drive up the rate of exploitation in order to line their pockets and those of their shareholders.
A report issued yesterday by the think-tank, the Resolution Foundation, found that contrary to the claims of employers that these contracts are only used for those seeking short-term flexible work (such as students) they are, in fact, becoming a permanent way of life for hundreds of thousands of workers and young people.
More than two-thirds of zero-hours workers aged over 25 have been in the same job for over a year. This means that far from being a short-term option, these contracts have become a permanent way of life along with all the insecurity and poverty level wages that zero-hours working entails.
The number of workers forced to take zero-hours contracts, which carry no guarantee of the hours a person will be called on to work and provides for workers to be sent home at a moment’s notice if the boss decides they are not needed, is rapidly increasing.
The Office for National Statistics latest figure for the number of workers on these contracts shows they have jumped up by 20% in the last year to over 900,000. At the same time the ONS found that about 1.7 million zero-hours contracts were in use meaning that many workers were being forced to take on more than one contract in order to survive.
The typical worker on a zero-hours contract earns 50% less an hour than a full-time employee according to a TUC analysis. This regime of vicious exploitation of workers is not confined to the retail industry or fast-food companies, it is rapidly expanding in all the public services, including the NHS, where their use has shot up and not just in areas like cleaning but, according to Unison, into cardiac and psychiatric services among others.
The release of these damning figures naturally drew the same old response from the TUC leadership, with its general secretary Francis O’Grady pontificating that: ‘Today’s figures are a stark reminder of why we need to create more decent jobs people can actually live on.’
As for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, despite his pledge to ban zero-hours contracts, the Labour Party leadership clearly have no problem hiring companies that use them – this year’s party conference security will be handled by OCS Security a firm that uses these contracts extensively.
British capitalism today is completely bankrupt, the latest manufacturing figures show that its manufacturing base, despite the advantage of a collapsing pound cheapening exports, is sliding into recession – or more accurately is crashing. No ‘decent’ jobs can be created out of thin air, instead the capitalist class can only make its profits by turning the clock back two hundred years to a time of poverty level wages when workers could be hired and fired at will or left to starve in the workhouses.
Capitalism in its historic crisis holds no future for workers or youth. The demand at next week’s TUC conference must be that it calls a general strike to kick out the Tories and replace them with a workers’ government that will advance to a socialist society that will expropriate the bankers and bosses and guarantee full employment at decent wages for every worker. We urge every News Line reader – make sure that you are at Monday’s lobby of the TUC!
