Tories offer shares for rights? Stuff ’em.* October 8, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy.trackback
A fairly stunningly awful proposal from George Osborne today where in his speech to the Tory conference he floated the idea of employees being given shares in exchange for agreeing to give away rights.
In a keynote speech to the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, the chancellor unveiled plans for a new owner-employee scheme aimed at small and medium-sized companies wishing to create a “flexible workforce”.
Osborne said the contract would be voluntary on both sides and would see employees given between £2,000 and £50,000 of shares that are exempt from capital gains tax. In exchange, they would give up their UK employment rights on unfair dismissal, redundancy, and the right to request flexible working and time off for training, and would be required to provide 16 weeks’ notice of a firm date of return from maternity leave, instead of the usual eight.
The sheer inequities of such proposals are almost breathtaking. For a start what would be the standardised basis of this exchange given that rights tend to be uniform (in their application for workers) whereas shares are contingent in each individual company case. But that’s only one problem with this, and by no means the most significant one.
Rights exist across the entirety of a working lifetime. How long would £50,000 worth of shares last? How long would £2,000 last?
And would those sums make up for lost redundancy rights in the case of a sacking?
The provision on maternity leave is atrocious, striking at the heart of any efforts directed to making workplaces positive environments for those with families.
And as for choice? And it being voluntary?
…a Treasury press statement makes clear that while owner-employee status will be optional for existing employees, “both established companies and new start-ups can choose to offer only this new type of contract for new hires” — effectively giving staff no choice to retain their employment rights instead of taking the shares.
Those who are at the bottom of the work pyramid, either in terms of age, experience or nature of job are those most likely to feel pressurised into this because the power relationships are so out of balance.
Rights aren’t generally transactional, or in the small number of instances where they are – as with the case of dangerous or unpleasant work – the recompense should be real and upfront in terms of payment and/or other substantive benefits. To essentially offer what is a gamble – on shares that can decrease in value as much as increase, assuming they had any in the first place, is profoundly wrong.
But it is the sort of idea that only those who were completely detached from the realities of working life could come up with. Only someone whose experience of working was markedly at odds with that of most of us – or someone whose experience was almost exclusively positioned at the top of the pyramid – could come up with the following:
Osborne said the scheme would mean that “owners, workers and the taxman” were “all in it together”.
“Workers: replace your old rights of unfair dismissal and redundancy with new rights of ownership. And what will the government do? We’ll charge no capital gains tax at all on the profit you make on your shares. Zero percent capital gains tax for these new employee-owners. Get shares and become owners of the company you work for.”
‘Owners’? Because a worker holds shares? Yeah, right. What a crock.
* Unfortunately our own moderation guidelines are problematic in terms of expressing precisely what I feel about this…
I’m tempted to type a word I never use.
If we tolerate this, slavery will be next.
listening to a history lecture just now about famine in china and it mentioed people entering into voluntary slavery.
In exchange, they would give up their UK employment rights on unfair dismissal, redundancy, and the right to request flexible working and time off for training,
Good God, it’s even worse than I thought it was. Appalling.
Absolutely disgusting on every level.
Vile reactionaries. Always were always will be.
And the Lib Dems are apparently on board with this. If Labour don’t manage to turn this into an issue then all hope is lost.
The GlibDumbs political credo is opportunism and nothing else; I heard and read enough crypto-racist guff from their local candidates in Tower Hamlets years ago to know that.
I’d heard something of that re the LDs over the years. Never made me very convinced they were a progressive force.
Oh yes, there is many a UK Labour canvasser (bith entrist and not!) that could back up those stories about LibDems and Libs before them playing the racist card.
Not to mention the classic instance of the SDP playing the homophobia card to get Simon Hughes past Peter Tatchell in the Bermondsey by-election when Hughes was actually in the closet himself. A reliably wretched bunch they’ve always been.
That Tory proposal is desperate. You wonder if we’re entering an age when the trade unon rights which were being won a hundred years ago are going to be rolled back. Much of the ‘public sector should share the pain’ rhetoric in Ireland seems to be based around the idea that public servants should be subjected to the same job insecurity and casualisation currently bedevilling the private sector. But it’s the latter not the former which is unacceptable.
Watching the very good New York documentary series on PBS which dealt, among other things, with the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire, it was striking (A) how hard won trade union rights were and (B) how they were fought every step of the way by businessmen and their representatives who thought the profit motive was sacrosanct. Workers weren’t given anything lightly, everything had to be fought for.
And of course similar industrial accidents due to similar working conditions still happen in parts of the globe where the situation is similar to that obtaining in 19th century Europe. Proclamations of Marx’s irrelevance because ‘he was actually talking about people in English factories in the 19th century’ make no sense in a world of globalised capital.
“Much of the ‘public sector should share the pain’ rhetoric in Ireland seems to be based around the idea that public servants should be subjected to the same job insecurity and casualisation currently bedevilling the private sector. But it’s the latter not the former which is unacceptable.”
+1
2Watching the very good New York documentary series on PBS which dealt, among other things, with the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire, it was striking (A) how hard won trade union rights were and (B) how they were fought every step of the way by businessmen and their representatives who thought the profit motive was sacrosanct. Workers weren’t given anything lightly, everything had to be fought for.
And of course similar industrial accidents due to similar working conditions still happen in parts of the globe where the situation is similar to that obtaining in 19th century Europe. Proclamations of Marx’s irrelevance because ‘he was actually talking about people in English factories in the 19th century’ make no sense in a world of globalised capital.”
All excellent points. What’s missing, however, is the degree to which nowadays trade union ‘leaders’ are will to cede rights, pay, conditions working on the principle that X or Y paycut, diminution of conditions or change in work practices is the lesser evil in this or that circumstance. While justifiable on a tactical level in very limited circumstances, it has now reached a point where the myriad of small setbacks across the workforce here are cumulatively building up into a slow, silent defeat of organised workers in this state that, at a structural level, is probably as profound as that inflicted in open conflict by Thatcher during the 1980′s in the UK.
The complete acquiescence on the part of the union leadership with the 10% paycut for new entrants, and compulsory start at the first point of the relevant scale, in the public service is already wreaking havoc within teaching, entrenching divisions between young and older teachers which will stymie solidarity.
To add to your points above, I would state that every advance for workers was either won by militancy and/or the threat of militancy and was often won by direct conflict with the state. They won’t be defended or retained by a union movement which prizes ‘industrial harmony’ or ‘partnership’ with the state or employers. And these rights won’t be defended by union leaders who clearly place their loyalties to political parties (Labour now, FF pre-2011) above the interests of workers. And finally, fantasies about the EU as the custodian and guardian of workers’ rights, a belief embedded in the DNA of union officialdom here, are, in the current climate, grounds for diagnosing political insanity.
Alas, my final, final point, next year’s centenary of the Lockout will probably turn out to be grotesque travesty where the union officialdom warp the meaning of the Lockout to argue that, to take only one of possibly dozens of examples, ‘were Larkin and Connolly alive today they’d be calling for pay restraint and urging workers to put the national interest above personal concerns.’ Where ‘personal’ concerns for hundreds of thousands of workers include imminent financial meltdown and the ‘national interest’ includes facilitating the ongoing pillage of the public finances to pay bondholders.
Until such time as there is a resurgence of militancy – unofficial strikes, injunctions, jailing of strikers, occupations – the steady erosion of workers rights will continue. Indeed, I think a steady but sure process of eroding rights over a suitably long period of time (another CLR thread today concerns the view that this crisis will last to at least 2018) is preferable to the establishment which fears, reasonably enough, that a full frontal assault will likely trigger a fightback.
There is no bottom level for them really is there. They make it awkward to have kids in order to make things more competitive, they make it easy to fire people in order to make things more competitive and they reduce pay to make things more competitive. But competitive only means more on the bottom line. It doesnt mean better societies. That beyond all that they now propose that people volunteer to trade off their rights for some equity is sickening,
the 50000 limit would you think be a lot of shares but surely its just a sop to say that look the high earners can do the same. Id expect the amount of people electing to waive their rights for 50k in shares is a small few, and that those who might be eligible for such a threshold are likely already enjoying either good bonus structures or share options already.
That’s very true, re those eligible already being inside that structure and that would be in addition to reasonable wages (unless it was a startup and then the situation would be fairly different in the first place).
Labour org rights are no longer relevant when u have so much additional workers coming in. A sad reality of the modern western world. Workers no longer have broad leverage. The reps gave it up.
I see the Tories are having a closed session at their ard fheis to discuss cutting the deficit. Chances of people in balaclavas appearing threatening to kill the receivers of social welfare?
The conference really is where they tear the masks off and you catch a glimpse of the foul time- travelling shapeshifters from a dystopian future beneath. Philip Dick probably had nightmares about George Osbourne.
Remember this “Simpsons” scene?
Homer :“Homer Simpson here.”
Stockbroker:“Homer, it’s your stockbroker. Your stock in the power plant just went up for the first time in ten years.”
Homer “I own stock?”
–Stockbroker:
“Yes, all the employees got some in exchange for waiving…
certain Constitutional rights.”
Next week, Cameron yells “Smithers, release the hounds!”
at the end of Parliement.
When it turns into the Simpson’s we’re in deep trouble. But as you say it looks like it has.
David Mitchell on the topic..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/14/workers-rights-shares-david-mitchell
The Eye
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A5acQRRCAAAe82a.jpg