GMB, the union for taxi and professional drivers, on Monday joined forces with global consumer group SumOfUs to hand in a 100,000-strong mass petition to City Hall calling on Transport for London (TfL) to force Uber to respect workers’ rights or get out of London.
The £51 billion San-Francisco transport giant license to operate in London remains under review having been granted a four month extension in May 2017. 72% of Londoners believe that TfL should require Uber to guarantee safeguards such as minimum wage and paid holidays for their drivers, according to a poll of adults in London conducted by YouGov on behalf of SumOfUs.
The mass petition was handed in to Labour London Assembly Member Unmesh Desai, who has backed the campaign – and who will submit it to TfL as it considers Uber’s application for a new operating licence in London. GMB and SumofUs have gathered more than 106,000 public signatures asking TfL not to renew the license unless Uber guarantees safe working practices and basic employment rights to its drivers.
In October 2016, an employment tribunal ruled in GMB’s favour – determining that Uber drivers are workers entitled to basic workers’ rights and that the company are wrong to label them as self-employed. GMB brought two test cases to the Central London Employment Tribunal on 20 July 2016 and it decided that Uber drivers are entitled to receive holiday pay, a guaranteed minimum wage and an entitlement to breaks. GMB’s successful legal action has major implications for more than 40,000 drivers across England and Wales – as well as for emerging employment practices in the so-called gig economy.
Steve Garelick, Branch Secretary for GMB Professional Drivers, said: ‘This is an unprecedented opportunity for TfL to show some muscle and force Uber to either treat drivers properly and protect public safety – or get out of London. GMB has campaigned long and hard to force Uber to give drivers the basic rights to which they are entitled, winning a landmark employment tribunal – it’s time they were told in no uncertain terms to respect the judgment. Now more than 100,000 people have signed this petition to show they back GMB”s fight and are sending a clear message to TfL to take action over Uber. No company should be allowed to behave like it’s above the law.’
Eoin Dubsky, SumOfUs campaigner, said: ‘Transport for London has adopted great policies in the past on buying fair trade, guaranteeing a living wage, and even helping stop abuses in its electronics supply chains overseas. SumOfUs members helped secure that last one, and are adding our voices to the vast majority of Londoners, who say TfL shouldn’t let Uber continue running roughshod over drivers’ rights.’
SumOfUs is a global consumer group that campaigns to hold big corporations accountable.
Over 10 million people have taken over 50 million actions worldwide with SumOfUs since it launched.
• The GMB on Monday published figures that show public sector employment as a share of the labour market has fallen to a seventy year low. Official figures released this week show that 16.9 per cent of workers were employed in the public sector in June – a 0.1 per cent fall on the previous quarter.
This is the lowest share since the Office of National Statistics (ONS) current records began in 1999 – and historic Bank of England data reveals it is the lowest share since 1947, the year before the NHS was founded. Even under Margaret Thatcher the public sector’s share of employment did not fall below 20 per cent.
Just under a million public jobs have been lost since 2010 due to funding cuts, privatisation and outsourcing. The majority of the jobs lost have been in local government. A new GMB report published this week argued Government’s review of public sector pay policy is ignoring the 55 per cent of public sector worker who are not covered by a Pay Review Body, such as local government workers and school support staff.
The report also reveals:
• Central Government has removed an estimated £5 billion from local authority budgets in order to enforce the pay cap across the whole public sector;
• As recruitment and retention challenges mount, the cost of agency and temporary workers has increased by £2.5 billion since 2012/13. By contrast, the Treasury estimated that the cap would save £2.2 billion in 2017/18 – raising the prospect that the cap is not saving any money at all;
• On average, Police Community Support Officers (who are not covered by the new pay award for police officers) are set to lose £9,580 in real-terms by 2020 due to the pay cap.
Rehana Azam, GMB National Secretary for Public Services, said: ‘These shocking figures are a stark reminder of the scale of the catastrophe that are befalling our public services. Any sensible opportunities for efficiencies are long gone – funding reductions are now cutting into sheer bone.
‘GMB’s members are performing miracles but the vital services they deliver are being stripped-back and hollowed-out and denied the resources they need, and workers are being denied the fair pay rises they deserve.
‘We should celebrate the fact that people are living longer, but if services don’t get additional funding then crises of provision are inevitable. That breaking point has already arrived in the NHS and social care. Seventy years ago the Labour Government of Attlee and Nye Bevan created cherished public services that have improved and saved millions of lives.
‘Today’s Conservatives seem intent on dragging us back to the dark days of the past instead.
‘Enough is enough. We need to properly fund public services so they can cope with sharply rising demand, and real pay rises for the heroes in the workforce who sacrifice so much and are being denied the reasonable standard of living they deserve.’
• Unite has warned that a proposed new scaffolding card scheme will decrease standards and lead to scaffolders having different skills cards for different projects. Unite has been informed by the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB) that it is in the process of developing a new scaffolding card scheme.
The ECITB’s decision is as a result of pressure from several offshore fabric maintenance companies and is being supported by the Scaffolding Association and the Offshore Construction Association. The proposed scheme will directly compete with the established scaffolding registration scheme the Construction Industry Scaffolders Record Scheme (CISRS).
The ECITB breakaway scheme appears to be a direct result of the CISRS scheme introducing, from 1 July 2017, a compulsory two day continuing professional development course (CPD) which all scaffolders will have to undertake in order to have their card renewed.
The CPD course was introduced following pressure from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) who criticised the scaffolding industry. The HSE asked CISRS to intervene regarding ongoing CPD updates, as it expressed concern that the scaffold industry was not ensuring the ongoing competency of scaffolders.
Unite has been successful in ensuring that workers covered by the National Agreement for Engineering Construction Industry and on other individual sites, will be fully paid while taking the two day course and the cost of the course, travel and accommodation will be met by employers. Unite is organising a meeting of its senior stewards in scaffolding for later this month.
The meeting will decide on a plan of action to oppose the creation of the new rogue scaffolding card scheme. Unite national officer for construction Bernard McAulay said: ‘The proposal to introduce a rogue scaffolding scheme is bad news for workers.
‘It will affect standards and create confusion on sites. With workers regularly moving between sites it is also likely to hit them in their pockets as they will be forced to purchase two different cards, to ensure they are able to accept job offers.
‘The creation of a new card is not about improving standards and has everything to do with a few employers, principally those working offshore, wanting to avoid paying scaffolders for the training they need to ensure they remain fully competent in the work they do. Our members are not going to accept this attack on their skills and their pay packets.
‘The employers behind these proposals are being placed on notice that these proposals are entirely unacceptable. Scaffolding is one of the most safety critical roles in the construction industry and we should be ensuring that standards are being pushed up, rather than watered down.
‘In recent years there has been a great deal of effort in reducing the number of construction card schemes, in order to improve standards and to avoid confusion and it now appears that the ECITB is prepared to chuck that good work out of the window to appease a few penny pinching employers.’
