What is Communism?

 

Striking workers are providing the opposition that Britain desperately needs

Andy Beckett in The Guardian

In Britain, more than in most democratic countries, going on strike is a risk. Your employer, the government, most of the media, much of the public and often the opposition parties are likely to be against you – or, at best, unsupportive. Your loss of income is unlikely to be made up by strike pay. Your behaviour on the picket line will be subject to what Tony Blair described approvingly in 1997 as “the most restrictive” trade union laws “in the western world”.

In very public ways, you will be breaking the rules of the modern economy: refusing to work, inconveniencing consumers, acting collectively rather than individually, and making demands for more money openly – rather than in private, as more powerful people do. If you are on the left, you are likely to be told again and again that your strike is politically counterproductive.

Such are the written and unwritten laws that have constricted British strikes for approaching half a century, ever since the walkouts of the 1978-79 winter of discontent inadvertently did so much to bring Margaret Thatcher to power and to provoke the counter-revolution against workers that still continues today. Many voters have long got used to the idea that strikes are a minority pursuit associated with a bygone age to which the country must not return. Boris Johnson’s government, with its especially strong intolerance of dissent, aims to demonise and marginalise strikes even further.

Yet this summer, more and more Britons are striking or considering striking regardless. From railway workers to barristers, firefighters to doctors, Post Office workers to teachers, nurses to civil servants, council workers to British Telecom engineers, an unusually large potential strike wave is building. Its social breadth, the range of occupations affected and the atmosphere on some picket lines all suggest that something politically significant may be happening.

At the first barristers’ protest, outside the Old Bailey in London this week, an already excited crowd of advocates in courtroom wigs and gowns burst into prolonged applause when they were joined by a few activists in shorts and jeans from the RMT. It’s not every day that you see such camaraderie between self-employed professionals who rely heavily on trains and striking transport workers carrying a banner that calls for “the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”.

The cost of living crisis, and the refusal of the government and other employers to raise wages accordingly, is the immediate reason for this summer’s “wave of resistance”, as Mick Lynch of the RMT union calls it. Yet the causes go deeper: more than a decade of stagnant or falling wages; the long Conservative squeeze on the public sector; and the whole transformation of the British economy since the 1970s, which has effectively taken money from workers and given it to employers, shareholders and the wealthy.


Public dissatisfaction with this model has been growing for years. In the latest British Social Attitudes survey, 64% agree that “‘ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth” – up from 57% in 2019, and far greater than the support for any party. As Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn tapped into this discontent. But the end of his tenure, and Keir Starmer’s apparent lack of interest in its redistributive ideas, has created a vacuum where a movement with a radical economic agenda ought to be.

It’s possible that the strike wave could become one such movement. While support for the strikes has been stronger than expected - the pollster Savanta ComRes found that even 38% of Tory voters considered the highly disruptive rail strikes “justified”; among younger people this attitude was particularly prevalent. In the same survey, 72% of under-35s backed the strikers. Since few of them have ever been on strike themselves – less than a quarter of trade unionists are under 35 – then the likely explanation is not shared experience but shared disenchantment. Young people, like many of the strikers, have been particularly badly served by the status quo.

Many young people supported Corbyn for the same reason. And there are other similarities between the two movements. Former Corbyn advisers such as James Schneider, Corbyn himself, and the parliamentary Labour left all support the strikers. Green activists, once an important part of Corbyn’s coalition, have joined RMT picket lines. Like Labour’s 2017 election manifesto, Lynch uses clear, populist language – “every worker in Britain” should get a much better pay deal, he told Question Time – and its effectiveness has taken the media by surprise. Support for the RMT strike rose after his TV appearances.

Could the strikers succeed, not just in getting fairer pay deals but in beginning to change how the economy works? It’s an immense task, which Labour under Corbyn sometimes talked about compellingly but never came close to carrying out. And as the strikes widen and lengthen, public opinion may turn against them. Walking to work because of a train strike will seem less of a novelty and more of an imposition if that dispute drags on into the autumn. One of the obvious but often forgotten lessons of the winter of discontent is that voters often hate strikes in cold weather.

Excited union talk about building new mass movements has proved over-optimistic in the past, for example during David Cameron’s government. The proportion of British employees who are union members has stabilised in recent years, after decades of decline, but by historic standards it is still low: less than one in four. And the fact that Starmer is not prepared to support the strikers removes one of the main means by which their campaigns could be amplified.

Yet for almost a decade now, British politics has not followed the expected paths. It may be that an economy built on poor wages was politically and socially sustainable only while inflation stayed low. That relatively stable and docile era may be over. Recently, the leftwing website Left Foot Forward listed some of the pay rises already won this summer by the increasingly assertive trade union Unite: “300 workers at Gatwick get 21 per cent”, “300 HGV drivers win 20 per cent”. In post-Thatcher Britain, such transfers of wealth to the workers – not just matching but far exceeding the rate of inflation – aren’t supposed to happen. But they are.

Unlike in the 1980s, when the iron lady beat Britain’s last big wave of strikes, unemployment is low and the supply of labour is short. If strikers don’t like a pay offer, sometimes they can threaten to go and work for someone who pays more. You could call it an example of something the Tories talk less about these days: market forces.

Retrenchment, Relocation, Closure - Are these the only options available to employers?

 

Marx's Flaws

 

Time spent in the pub is a wise investment

Sarah O'Connor in The FT

When I joined the Financial Times as a trainee in 2007, I spent a lot of time learning about credit default swaps and a similar amount of time in the pub. The CDS knowledge proved useful in the ensuing financial crisis, but 13 years later, I am glad of the hours spent in the pub too. 

It was how I got to know my colleagues, who taught me the FT’s folklore, its funny anecdotes and its subtle power dynamics. I just thought I was having fun, but an economist would have said I was building “social capital”, defined by the UK’s statistical office as “the extent and nature of our connections with others and the collective attitudes and behaviours between people that support a well-functioning, close-knit society”. 

Social capital is a fuzzy concept and hard to measure. But Covid-19 has made us think about who has it, who doesn’t, how we build it and how we lose it. 

I was near the end of my maternity leave when the pandemic started, so it has now been almost 18 months since I last worked in the office. I’m grateful every day for my store of social capital, which has helped me to stay connected, though I do get a twinge of anxiety with every new byline I don’t recognise. 

It has been much tougher for people starting out this year. If it is hard to maintain relationships via video calls, it is harder still to build them from scratch. I spoke recently to some senior accountants about their new crop of trainees. They were learning their trade, but there was no opportunity for general chit-chat before and after virtual meetings, and the trainees seemed to find it harder to ask “daft questions” in video calls than when “sitting round a table with a packet of biscuits”. 

Next year, employers will have to think creatively about how to help new employees “catch up” on forming social capital, especially in a world of “hybrid” work where people stay at home for several days a week. 

Inadequate social capital is a problem for organisations as well as individuals. Research suggests that social capital boosts efficiency by reducing transaction and monitoring costs. In other words, “society wastes resources when people distrust and are dishonest with each other”, according to Dimitri Zenghelis, leader of the Wealth Economy project at Cambridge university, which explores social and natural capital.  

I am often struck by the inefficiencies of distrustful workplaces. Companies using screenshot and mouse-tracking software can end up in a cat-and-mouse game with resentful workers using tech workarounds of their own. Employers who doubt the honesty and motivation of their staff compel line managers to hold “return to work” meetings with employees after every sickness absence, even of only a day. Factories and warehouses often have long queues at shift changes as staff go through scanners to prove they are not stealing. Covid-19 might push some employers further in this direction, particularly if they decide to use more offshore workers with whom they have no prior relationship. 

On the other hand, this year’s forced experiment with homeworking has made some employers realise their staff can be trusted to work productively without oversight. The key will be to hold on to that trust, and the efficiencies it brings, rather than slip back into old habits of micromanagement. 

Social capital matters for economies, too. For his book Extreme Economies, economist Richard Davies travelled to nine unusual places, from a refugee camp in Jordan to an Indonesian town destroyed by the 2004 tsunami. He was struck by how societies with higher social capital were more resilient when disaster struck. In Glasgow, by contrast, he argued that the replacement of tenement homes with tower blocks had dismantled the social capital of the people who lived there, making it harder for them to cope with economic decline. 

For both individuals and economies, social capital is an important buffer against unexpected hardships. Yet in the UK, where the Office for National Statistics has been trying to track various indicators of social capital over time, the trend has not been good. We exchanged favours or stopped to talk with our neighbours less often in 2017/18 than we did in 2011/12. Our sense of belonging to our neighbourhoods also fell. Parents became less likely to regularly give help to, and receive help from, their adult children. 

The pandemic has strained our ability to maintain the bonds between us, but it has also reminded us just how important they are. Any plan to “build back better” when the crisis ends should include plenty of time in the pub.

How fighting an employer or becoming a whistleblower can lead to retaliation and undermining tactics

 Alicia Clegg in The FT

Caroline Barlow felt little emotion when she settled with the BBC last May and withdrew her employment tribunal claims over unequal pay and constructive dismissal. Just a crushing tiredness that left her shaky and sick and so disoriented that for a while she stopped driving. 

She now views her reaction as a kind of grieving, for her job and faith in an institution that she had revered. She entered the BBC’s pay review process suspecting that she was paid less than male heads of product doing jobs similar to her own, and received a 25 per cent rise, though with little explanation of how the figure was arrived at. So she used data protection law to view internal documents that indicated that even after the increase she would still be paid less. The assessors argued, without providing evidence, that she had skills she still needed to develop and the men had bigger roles. 

“Publicly the BBC was saying it had introduced a transparent process. Yet, it was made very clear to me that I’d only get salary information on my peers at a final tribunal hearing by court order,” she says. 

Like the journalist Carrie Gracie, who also challenged unequal pay at the BBC, Ms Barlow talks of her sense of entering a no-man’s-land of stonewalling and doublespeak, where evidence that she presented was watered down or selectively reported. She says that a strategic project described as “transforming” in a business case, for which she obtained executive committee sign-off, was trivialised as “a hygiene project” after she questioned her pay. She felt blocked by the slow progress of her grievance — she only received the outcome on her final day of employment − undermined in numerous small ways and made to feel unimportant. She became ill and was diagnosed with depression. 

Lawrence Davies, director of Equal Justice Solicitors, who acted for Ms Barlow, says such experiences are common. Most employers try to quash internal complaints to avoid exposing themselves legally, should the employee sue. Yet while employers uphold only 1 per cent of grievances, he says, 65-70 per cent of complainants who persevere to an employment tribunal ultimately win, though the strain can be immense. 

Kathy Ahern, a retired mental health nurse and academic, studied the psychological toll of challenging an employer after discovering that nurses who reported misconduct had strong beliefs about what it means to be a nurse. When they faced reprisals for putting patients before other loyalties they suffered overwhelming mental distress, not just because of what was done, but because the institutional reality gave the lie to everything that nursing codes of conduct teach. Another study, published in the journal Psychological Reports in 2019, found levels of anxiety and depression among whistleblowers are similar to those of cancer patients. 

Ms Ahern likens retaliatory employers to domestic abusers who psychologically manipulate or “gaslight” a partner to destroy their self-confidence and credibility. Tell-tale patterns, which she documents in a review paper published in the Journal of Perinatal & Neonatal Nursing in 2018, run the gamut from maliciously finding fault, to sustained campaigns of petty slights and obstructions, to seeding rumours that the victim is unhinged. 

Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, believes that while employers sometimes label whistleblowers as “crazy” simply to tarnish them, this may actually be how they see them. To “more negotiable” colleagues who know when to bend with the wind, they may come across as “unreasonable sticklers”, and end up friendless and questioning their own sanity. 

Margaret Oliver, a former detective with Greater Manchester Police, says that senior officers dismissed her as “unreasonable” and “too emotionally involved” when she voiced concerns about the conduct of two investigations into child sexual exploitation, Operation Augusta (2004-2005) and Operation Span (2010-2012). 

After returning from sick-leave, brought on by stress, she spotted an article in the staff newspaper in which GMP’s then chief constable urged officers to challenge police policies that their gut told them was wrong. She “took the scary step” of contacting him directly. But instead of meeting her, as she had suggested, she says he replied with a “bland email” promising that her concerns would be reviewed and passing her back down the command chain. 

Having got nowhere, she resigned in 2012 and went public with her allegations, prompting the Mayor of Greater Manchester to commission an independent review. In January this year phase one, covering the period to 2005, concluded that Operation Augusta, had, as she always alleged, been closed down prematurely and children at risk of sexual exploitation had been failed. Ms Oliver recently launched the Maggie Oliver Foundation to support abuse survivors, and also whistleblowers who, like her, have nowhere to turn. “I asked myself: ‘Is there something obvious to others that I’m not seeing? Or is what I’m seeing wrong and making me ill?’ I felt isolated,” she says. 

Isolation dogged whistleblower Aaron Westrick throughout a 14-year US legal battle concerning alleged corruption in the body armour industry that concluded, in 2018, with all the defendants ultimately making settlement payments. 

As research director at Second Chance Body Armor (since liquidated), Mr Westrick urged his employer to recall a line of defective bulletproof vests containing Zylon, a material manufactured by Japanese company Toyobo. Instead he says that he was frozen out, told by an HR officer accompanied by his employer’s attorney that he was “crazy,” sacked and maligned. “If there’s one word that describes being a whistleblower, it’s loneliness,” he says. “Even your friends don’t really get it.” 

Georgina Halford-Hall, chief executive of WhistleblowersUK, says the stress of fighting a bad employer is all-consuming. But, however difficult, it is important to continue doing the everyday things you enjoy. Drawing on personal experience, she recommends finding an independent mental health professional to offload on. “Don’t make every conversation with your partner and friends about your concerns, because that only isolates you further, making it likelier that you’ll end up behaving irrationally.” 

From a practical standpoint, the best way for society to support victims of retaliation is to pay their legal fees, says Peter van der Velden, senior researcher at CentERdata, a Dutch research institute, and lead investigator of the study published in Psychological Reports. “What we know from research is that financial problems are a main stressor, few people have money for a lawyer after losing their job.” Something organisations should consider doing, that might strengthen their culture, is to look for opportunities to hire former whistleblowers rather than giving them a wide berth, says Marianna Fotaki, professor of business ethics at the University of Warwick Business School. 

Ms Barlow says she still has “bad days”, though increasingly less so. Finding people who have had similar experiences, she says, is helping her rebuild her shattered sense of self. “It keeps your feet grounded in reality, not the manipulated version of reality that your employer wants you to believe.” 


The Choreography of Retaliation 

When organisations retaliate against employees, they tend to do so through a gradual piling on of pressure that pushes the individual to the point where they mistrust their own judgment, says Kathy Ahern. They become anxious, hypersensitive to threats and easy to cast as “overreacting, or simply disgruntled”. Some warning signs of what she terms a “gaslighting” pattern of retaliation include:

 ▪Reassuring employees that their complaints are being investigated, while repeatedly stalling.

 ▪Using euphemisms that diminish the person’s experience, such as “grey area” or “personality clash” for victimisation. 

▪Finding fault with a highly-regarded employee who makes a complaint. ▪Praising someone for reporting misconduct, while doing nothing to prevent reprisals.

▪ Encouraging an employee who has suffered retaliation to take sick leave or undergo a psychological evaluation, under the guise of offering support.

Prof. Wolff on "The Basic Economics of Immigration"

Why employers ignore abuse complaints

Michael Skapinker in The Financial Times


“We all knew about it! We. All. Knew,” Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of London’s Royal Court Theatre, said of the sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the film and theatre industries. 

People felt that, as long as it was not happening in their rehearsal rooms or their theatres, they weren’t responsible, she told The Guardian. “I just can’t believe that we’ve all colluded,” she said. 

Allegations of sexual abuse by top executives are rarely a surprise to those who work for or with them. So why does it take a newspaper investigation or a small number of brave individuals to uncover what so many on the inside already knew? 

First, complaining is like leaping off a cliff on your first sky dive. Once done, there is no going back. And the risks of it going wrong are huge. Those who complain are usually, at best, ignored. Otherwise, they are often crushed by the superior force of the organisation’s lawyers and drummed out of the industry. 

In many years of talking to whistleblowers and complainants about corporate abuse, I have not met any who emerged undamaged. The problem with my skydiving analogy is that skydivers have a far higher chance of landing unscathed. 

An allegation of abuse or harassment threatens not just the managers concerned but also the way the organisation sees itself 

And sexual abuse is only one aspect of organisational harassment. There are other ways managers misuse their power, such as systematic bullying and victimisation. 

When people do speak up, organisations usually fail to respond or hit back at the complainants, alleging, for example, that their performance has been poor. 

An allegation of abuse or harassment threatens not just the managers concerned but also the way the organisation sees itself. All enterprises have a purpose, an ethos, what we have come to call a corporate culture. Suggesting that mission is flawed threatens not only the organisation’s leaders, but its employees too. 

We devote most of our waking hours to working for our organisations. If someone suggests that everything we are doing is built on managers’ nefarious behaviour, what does it say about us that we are putting up with it? Those who speak out often find that their fellow workers prefer not to know. 

When those who complain get nowhere, “a subtle complicity evolves among the other employees”, an article in the Academy of Management Executive journal said. That complicity compounds the other employees’ shame at not speaking out, and makes it less likely that they will do so in future. 

Analysing “deaf ear” syndrome, the article, by a group of academics at the University of North Carolina, compares companies that close ranks against complainants to narcissists “who need to maintain a positive self-image and engage in ‘ego-defensive’ behaviour to preserve their self-esteem”. 

If the misbehaviour does come out, the article says, the damage to the organisation is often extensive — in compensation payments, the departure of senior employees and reputational damage. 

Does the recent flood of allegations mean people will be more willing to speak up? 

Well, that Academy of Management article appeared in 1998, nearly 20 years ago. It followed a string of sexual abuse scandals at Mitsubishi, the US Army and the US branch of Astra, the pharmaceuticals company that is now part of AstraZeneca. In the biggest settlement at that time, “Mitsubishi agreed to pay $34m to several hundred women who had alleged unheeded claims of sexual harassment over a period of years”, the article said. 

Yet here we are again, with serious allegations against, among others, Harvey Weinstein, co-founder of the Weinstein Company, and Kevin Spacey, former artistic director of London’s Old Vic theatre. 

Will things change? Will those who suffer abuse be readier to speak up, and are managers more likely to believe them and take action? One can hope so. But organisations’ drive to protect themselves and their own self-image will not go away. 

Real change would require independent third parties that people can report to, and impartial hearings. With trade union membership falling and access to legal representation increasingly out of reach of ordinary people, complaining remains as daunting a first step as ever.

Why have rights if workers fear using them?

Low-wage employees rarely claim what they’re entitled to for fear of being branded troublemakers by their boss


Barbara Ellen in The Guardian



It may be time to quash the myth, once and for all, that the only reason that low-wage workers don’t exercise their employment rights is because they don’t know about them. Perhaps even when they do, they fear that to exercise them would risk them being branded troublemakers and penalised. It’s also possible that employers know about this fear and cynically exploit it.

A TUC study has found that many low-paid workers (people with combined household incomes of £28,000 or less) are being “disciplined” for taking childcare-related time off. Forty-two per cent of parents felt they’d been stigmatised and punished for asking for more flexible hours, with some worrying that they would be given worse shifts or even lose their jobs, and 29% were dipping into annual leave when their children fell ill.

The report said that many of the low-waged seemed unaware that they had a legal right to 18 weeks’ unpaid parental leave if they’d held their jobs for a year, though these rights did not apply to everybody and could be impractical for those on zero-hour contracts (where shifts could change on an employer’s whim). What’s more, the rights became “meaningless” if workers felt that utilising them could lead to them being branded provocative, unreliable and, ultimately, unemployable.

Perhaps it’s time there was a new kind of narrative from the world of work and children, one that goes beyond even the unfolding shambles of the government’s election nursery care promises. Generally, it’s all about women being forced off the “fast track” on to the “mummy track” once they become parents or cyclical outbursts about how the macho nature of work culture isn’t conducive to parenthood or the holy grail of work/life balance.

Then there’s the saga of “parents versus non-parents”. There are tales of office-based sniping about parents arriving for work late, and leaving early, with parents feeling stressed, resented and misunderstood, and non-parents feeling that parents get far too much special consideration for their little darlings’ bouts of tonsillitis.

While all of these points remain valid, the TUC findings show a different world, one where the very notion of “work-life” balance would be considered a tasteless joke and where a working parent’s struggles doesn’t just mean a few covert snotty looks from the marketing team when they leave early for the school nativity play. It sometimes means the choice between using your holiday to look after your children when they’re ill or risking irritating employers and ending up on some unofficial shit list.

This situation appears to be multifaceted. Many low-wage workers in insecure positions don’t have the legal right to ask for more flexible hours (as well as lacking many other legal protections). Those who have rights may not be aware of them. And those who are aware of their rights may be afraid to use them, understandably so.

All of which leads to another issue, one flagged up by the TUC report, which undoubtedly affects every move a low-wage parent worker makes – that employers definitely know their workers’ rights.

However, they also know that they have the upper hand in this ugly era of sanctioned worker exploitation. And so even if a lone voice does dare to raise itself, it could be effectively muzzled and silenced, just with the unspoken threat of the worker being stigmatised, penalised, even losing the job altogether.

There it is: not just the problem, but the disgrace, the human rights calamity of low-wage, insecure British work culture in the 21st century. What use are employment rights when there’s a thriving culture of workers being systematically intimidated into disregarding them?

Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules

BBC News

Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled.

This time has not previously been considered work by many employers.

It means firms including those employing care workers, gas fitters and sales reps may be in breach of EU working time regulations.

BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman said it could have a "huge effect".

"Thousands of employers could now find themselves in breach of working time regulations," he added.

'Falling below minimum wage'

Chris Tutton, from the solicitors Irwin Mitchell, agreed the ruling would be "very significant" and could have an impact on pay.

"People may now be working an additional 10 hours a week once you take into account their travel time, and that may mean employers are falling below the national minimum wage level when you look at the hourly rate that staff are paid," he said.

The court says its judgment is about protecting the "health and safety" of workers as set out in the European Union's working time directive.

The directive is designed to protect workers from exploitation by employers, and it lays down regulations on matters such as how long employees work, how many breaks they have, and how much holiday they are entitled to.

'Bear the burden'

One of its main goals is to ensure that no employee in the EU is obliged to work more than an average of 48 hours a week.

The ruling came about because of an ongoing legal case in Spain involving a company called Tyco, which installs security systems.

The company shut its regional offices down in 2011, resulting in employees travelling varying distances before arriving at their first appointment.

The court ruling said: "The fact that the workers begin and finish the journeys at their homes stems directly from the decision of their employer to abolish the regional offices and not from the desire of the workers themselves.

"Requiring them to bear the burden of their employer's choice would be contrary to the objective of protecting the safety and health of workers pursued by the directive, which includes the necessity of guaranteeing workers a minimum rest period."

Abracadabra! Britain’s political elite has fooled us all again

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Magicians call it misdirection: directing the attention of a crowd elsewhere so as to distract from the trick happening right in front of it. A bump on the shoulder, a blur of handwaving and – wham! – your wallet’s taken leave of your hip pocket.

Since the crash, British politics has been one epic act of misdirection. Lay off those bankers who shoved the country into penury! Just focus on stripping disabled people of their benefits. Never mind the millionaire bosses squeezing your pay! Spit instead at the minimum-wage migrant cleaners apparently making us poorer. So ingrained is the ritual that when a minister strides into view urging the need for “a grown-up debate”, we brace ourselves for another round of Blame the Victim. The only question is who gets sacrificed next: some ethnic minority, this family on low pay, that middle-aged dad who can’t get a job.

Here is how political misdirection works in real time. Yesterday, Unite’s Len McCluskey came under a barrage of criticism for suggesting that Labour live up to its name and support “ordinary working people”. Evil paymaster! Meanwhile, on the front page of this paper, digger firm JCB called on David Cameron to prepare to take Britain out of the EU – and this was just a company having its say.

JCB boss says EU exit could lift burden of bureaucracy on UK businesses

 

Read more

I hold no brief for McCluskey – but he is the democratically elected head of a trade union simply seeking to influence the party part-funded by his members. Perhaps this comes as news to some on Fleet Street, but the debate over Labour’s future is not the chew-toy solely of newspaper columnists. Moreover, Unite’s donations to Her Majesty’s Opposition are a matter of easily checkable record. Not so the money poured into Tory coffers by JCB, either as a business or from its owners, the Bamford family. To learn that, we must rely upon forensic researchers such as Stuart Wilks-Heeg at Liverpool University. He calculated this morning that, between 2001-14, the Bamfords and JCB had together given the Conservatives at least £6.7m. One arm of JCB also donated £600,000 last year to Tory campaigns in key marginals, including the all-important battleground of Nuneaton.

So a company that funded David Cameron all the way into Downing Street, and whose chairman was recently made a lord, seeks to influence the government on one of the most fundamental issues in British politics, something that affects all of us – and this is business as usual. Yet a workers’ elected representative adding his voice to the din of an internal party argument somehow represents the biggest political landgrab since a bloke with a goatee popped in to the Winter Palace.

Expect more of this misdirection over the next few weeks. Labour has scheduled the entire summer for its leadership campaign, which could equal months of an entire party sounding like an indecisive satnav: Veer right! Keep left! Meanwhile, in just over a month, George Osborne will lay out an emergency budget to deal with the enormous £90bn deficit that he inherited from himself. Using the traditional lexicon of political hocus-pocus – “hard choices” – he will begin making some of the extra £12bn of welfare cuts the Tories pledged at the last election.

Every feat of misdirection is always intended to distract the audience from a sleight of hand. The same goes in politics – only here it’s aimed at taking our minds off the fact that all this jiggery-pokery is actually making us worse off. Let me show you what I mean, using figures calculated for the Guardian by academics at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc), using official data. When Thatcher moved into No 10, 28% of all working age households took more from the state in cash benefits, in health and education and all the rest of it than they paid back in taxes. In other words, more than one in four employers in Britain were failing to pay their staff’s way.

The next round of cuts will hit the working poor all over again, like a hammer to the face

More than three decades later, through Major and Blair and Brown and Cameron, that proportion has kept on rising. Now 38% of working-age households rely on taxpayers to pay their way. Think about all those tax credits for low-paid work, those exemptions for people earning too little even to be taxed. We have more people in work than ever before – and more households than ever before relying on the state to keep them afloat.

There’s nothing wrong with these people. These are the hard-working families politicians like talking about – the strivers, the squeezed middle, the alarm-clock Britain. But there’s a lot wrong with their employers – because they now rely on taxpayers to top up poverty pay, even while insisting on cuts in corporation tax and grants for investment. Come 8 July, it won’t be those businesses that the chancellor tells to change their ways – it’ll be the people they employ who will see more money taken out of their weekly budget by the cuts. Because the one thing we know about the next round of cuts is that they will hit the working poor all over again, like a hammer to the face.

This is what politics looks like in Britain nowadays, once the newspapers have their japes and the politicians leave the TV studios: it is about justifying an extractive business class that wants to lean on taxpayers to pay their way, even while lecturing the rest of us about welfare dependency. And it doesn’t change all that much whether the Tories or Labour are in Downing Street. The Cresc team looked at who reaped the rewards from growth over the past three decades. Under Thatcher and Major, the top 10% of all working-age households took 29p in every £1 of income growth. Under Blair and Brown, their share actually went up, to 30p in each £1. Cresc found that New Labour bumped up the share of the poorest economically active households from 0.5% to 1.5%. Taxes and benefits evened that up a bit – the same taxes and benefits that are now deemed unaffordable. So much for trickle down.

This is what all the misdirection has been about: taking our minds off the fact that Britain is a soft touch for businesses that want taxpayers to pay their way, and politicians who count on the middle classes to feel richer, not through their wage packets, but by their house prices, their no-frills flights, their luxury buys from Lidl. What a trick has been pulled on Britain by its political and business elite: never have so many people had their pockets picked at the same time.

Tribunal fees deter four out of five employees pursuing claims

From The Independent

Employment tribunal fees have been branded "a barrier to justice", the high charges discouraging four out of five workers from pursuing claims against their employers, according to Citizens Advice.

The charity has found that nearly half of workers with employment issues would have to save for six months in order to afford employment tribunal fees, which in some cases can reach £1,200.

Citizens Advice has called on the Government to align tribunal fees with county court charges in order to widen access. It has also asked for greater promotion of available financial support, and more research to assess what measures could be taken to protect employers without deterring legitimate claims.

Employment tribunal fees were introduced by the Government in July 2013, aiming to transfer the £74m cost of running tribunals and the Employment Appeal Tribunal from the taxpayer to those using the system. Fees range from £160 to £250 to issue a claim, and £230 to £950 for a tribunal.

Before the fees were introduced, Employment Tribunals (ETs) received an average of 48,000 new claims per quarter. However the most recent ET figures for July to September 2014 show that this had dropped to 13,612 new claims.

Last week the trade union Unison, which wants to abolish the fees, lost a second bid to have the fees legally reviewed. Despite the dismissal, the Court of Appeal has granted Unison permission to appeal the decision.

Employment barrister, Harini Iyengar

The Citizens Advice survey found that the fees made more than four out of five workers less likely to claim, or deterred them from claiming at all. Over four in 10 of those with employment troubles had a household income of less than £46 a week after essential bills, highlighting the gulf between the high fees and working wages.

Only three in 10 were aware that financial support is available for those on low incomes. Half of those surveyed believed that they were not eligible for support when in fact they qualified.

Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice, said: "The employment tribunal system is imbalanced against claimants. Fees are pricing people out of basic workplace rights and a justice system that is supposed to protect them.

"The Government needs to take an urgent look again at how the fee system benefits those workers who feel the prices are a barrier to justice."

Labour has promised to abolish the fees, and reform the employment tribunal system if the party is elected. Sadiq Khan, Labour's shadow Justice Secretary, said: "At a time when people need support and legal advice more than ever, the Government has slashed legal aid, leaving thousands of people adrift without any support whatsoever … This policy has denied justice to thousands of people, yet all it does is displace costs on to other branches of government. It's a short-sighted policy that has far-reaching and negative ramifications."

Sadiq Khan, Labour’s shadow Justice Secretary; Labour has promised to abolish the fees, and reform the employment tribunal system if the party is elected (AP)

Damian Brown QC, a sports and employment lawyer and former chair of the Employment Law Bar Association, said: "Most of the profession believes access to justice should be free … Most businesses have insurance or the opportunity to join an employer's federation for a small fee, so the idea of tribunal fees being a protection against frivolous claims is not a significant problem."

Harini Iyengar, a barrister who specialises in employment and discrimination law, said: "The drop we've seen in employment tribunal cases has been extremely striking; I've not seen anything like it in 15 years of practice … It is important in a democratic country we respect working people and tribunals are essential for the British economy and to a vibrant working community."

Justice Minister Shailesh Vara defended the fees saying: "Small businesses can be hamstrung by unfounded employment tribunal claims and taxpayers should not have to pick up the £74m bill for running the service. We've made sure fee waivers are available for those who can't afford to pay, as well as diverting people away from potentially acrimonious hearings, where possible, through a new early conciliation scheme which has already been used by 37,000 people in its first six months."

Debunking the myths of your employment contract

Employment lawyer Philip Landau looks at some of the more common misconceptions about workers' contractual rights

Staff who familiarise themselves with their contract early on can avoid any nasty surprises further down the line. Photograph: Getty Images

Many workers are not aware of their contractual rights. Their written contract of employment (assuming they have one) is often only read in passing and they are consequently surprised – whether positively or negatively – when they have to rely on it. Here are several things that workers commonly believe, but are not actually true:

All the terms of my employment are set out in writing in my contract

A contract of employment is not necessarily one document; it can incorporate terms from a number of different sources, and can be written or verbal.

Express terms are those that are explicitly agreed between the parties (written or verbal), such as your hours of work, job description, notice, wages and sick pay. These terms could be found in a number of different documents such as a written statement of employment particulars, staff handbook, the job advertisement, payslips or, of course, the written employment contract itself.

Certain terms and conditions can also be implied into a contract of employment by common law or custom and practice. For example, both employer and employee have duty, trust and confidence implied into every relationship. If that fundamental trust is breached, a right of action could follow (in an employee's case, this would be a constructive dismissal claim). Other examples of an implied term can include an employer's decision to pay a bonus every year, or an enhanced redundancy pay, which could give rise to a custom and practice to receive such benefits.

My employer can't force me to relocate against my wishes

Yes, it can if you have a "mobility clause" written into your contract of employment. This would entitle it to move you to another location within the limits set out in the contract (unless your employer is acting unreasonably).

If you refuse to move, your employer may be able to avoid paying you redundancy.

If you do not have a mobility clause in your contract, you can generally refuse to move and still be entitled to receive redundancy payment. However, if the relocation is just a short distance (say a few miles) you could still lose this if you are seen to have unreasonably refused this suitable alternative employment.

My employer cannot vary the terms of my contract without my consent

Your consent may, in fact, have already been given when you entered into your contract of employment as there may be an express right reserved for your employer to make the required changes (a flexibility clause). This could apply, for example, to a change in job role or hours of work.

Such clauses are construed narrowly by the courts and your employer must act reasonably, but an employer will be in a far stronger position if the contract allows them to make this change. You may also have "impliedly" given your consent, especially if the imposed change is of immediate practical effect (such as a pay cut or change in commission structure) and you have continued to work without objection after the change. In these circumstances, there is unlikely to be a breach of contract by your employer.

My employer has to pay my outstanding bonus when I leave

If there is a clause in your contract of employment (which there often is) stating that you must be employed and not under notice "as at the bonus payment date", you may lose your bonus entitlement when you leave. Many are caught out when they resign and not aware of this clause.

Some employers purposefully choose to fast-track you out of the business to avoid you being employed at the bonus payment date – even if you have worked the full preceding year. They can do this by placing you on notice or making a payment under "pay in lieu of notice clause" in your contract. This is especially the case with bankers' bonuses, even where the announcement to make the bonus payments had been made many months beforehand.

I can work my notice when I leave my job

Once you resign or are given notice, you may think you would usually work that notice period. But assuming your employer has reserved the right in your contract, you could also be paid in lieu of your notice or put on garden leave.

Many individuals want to work for as long as possible as they consider prospective employers have more of a preference for candidates that are still employed. But employers will often want to cut ties early once a termination is on the cards – and pay in lieu of notice. You can't object.

If your employer elects to put you on garden leave, you are not required to attend work for the period of your notice, but are still contractually bound to your employer so cannot start a new job either. This is likely to have a greater impact, of course, if you have a longer period of notice.

It is always good to familiarise yourself with your employment contract so you can make the dealings with your employer work to your advantage when you need to. Or even better, try and negotiate more favourable terms before you sign it, as it will invariably be too late otherwise.

Are you familiar with the terms of your contract of employment? Have you ever regretted agreeing to certain terms or been surprised about what it contained?