Workers’ rights need greater championing than just protecting Sunday trading hours, writes Kye Parkin
March’s vote by the House of Commons against the Sunday trading laws bill was celebrated by a handful of MPs as a rare victory for retail workers and their families.
This is in spite of the fact that employment in the retail sector is dominated by part-time zero-hours’ contracts, which means that, for many shop workers, the key issue isn’t that they are putting too many hours in at the cash register – but that their employers offer them so few.
Introducing legal protections to keep Sundays sacred for family time and leisure pursuits would be a sound and much-needed policy intervention if it were applied to the UK’s vast legion of office workers, who battle increasingly demanding bosses and out-of-hours bombardments by email.
However, in the age of online shopping and increasing retail automation, it is a sad fact that Britain’s shop workers often struggle to a find job that offers them enough hours to make ends meet.
Politicians’ failure to recognise the extent of an issue that is faced by a significant proportion of the 2.9 million people currently employed in the British retail sector is not only careless, but it also misses the central purpose of legislating for workers’ rights. The task of government authorities should be to protect the fullest spectrum of workers’ interests and, as such, they should reasonably be expected to regard the freedom to work as equally important to freedom from work. While strides have undoubtedly been made in promoting accessibility, diversity and inclusivity at work, advanced legal protections covering supply side issues related to working time remain elusive.
Part of the reason for this, of course, is that designing policy to tackle these issues is fraught with complication, as zero-hours’ contracts demonstrate.
It is quite right that the abuse of zero-hours’ contracts has come under fire from politicians, trade unions and HR practitioners, but an all-out ban would not be a workable solution. When approached and implemented consensually, and with decency and respect, there is little doubt that zero-hours’ contracts can and do represent a mutually beneficial arrangement for employers and employees.
That said, such a stark polarisation of political opinion on the issue in the build up to the May 2015 general election appears to have clouded this fact, halting any real prospect of practicable change.
The world of work has changed rapidly since the mid-1970s, but political conceptions of workers’ rights remain firmly rooted in the dark days of flares, platform shoes and the three-day week.
Today, for better or for worse, we live in a 24/7 world in which food, entertainment and even relationships are on-demand, where boundaries between consumption and production are increasingly blurry. So why isn’t our work on-demand? And why don’t we protect job quality as intently as we do the rights of consumers?
The EU’s Working Time Directive exemplifies the disconnect between politico-legal conceptions of workers’ rights and work’s reality. But it would be churlish to suggest that the EU no longer has a role to play in this respect, particularly given the increasingly globalised nature of work.
So what are the solutions? Generally, it is vital that HR practitioners, policymakers, employers, employees and academics remain critically reflective, open to learning from events and, most importantly, engaged with one another – at every level.
As far as Sunday trading laws are concerned, politicians would have benefited from taking a far more coordinated and heuristically guided approach to decision-making that is relatively unaffected by cognitive bias. This could feasibly have been achieved by paying closer attention to the world of work today. In essence, MPs, workers pay your wages – so listen up.
Kye Parkin is a management PhD candidate at the University of Bath