You've spotted it?

No shit Sherlock.

Don't give up the day job.

Many of the Low Pay Units and wages negotiation boards have been abolished and Industrial Tribunals subjected to means testing. Working practices have been changed and the Unions emasculated. The Tories don't give a toss about worker's rights, they are only concerned with making maximum profits for themselves. Welcome to the new world of workplace slavery!

Indeed. No credible conversation about the actual poll, same as this thread. Just the same old from the same old.

There's a low pay commission and as I've already said, zero hour contracts have been in place since Adam was a boy. I suggest you look elsewhere for a gripe, like the abundance of immigrant workers.....and no, I'm not having a go at immigrants, just the system that's brought it about, perhaps your socialist Blair government.

As a somewhat useless and soundbyte council chief executive once said, paid opinion will say exactly what you want them to say.

Sadly, I am becoming ever more suspicious of that actuality in ever more places these days (and i'm not necessarily pointing at the Russians there like everyone else is).

I've been a player in a few planning inquiries and the wordsmith companies could be on either side and still make a case because that's what they're paid to do; very few, if any, have principles and some of them are lawyers. It's all about wordsmithing, a keyboard without a blush.

The only thing that is patently obvious to me is that some people cannot accept the referendum result and continue to prophesy doom and gloom. This country was better off not being in the Euro and not being part of the Schengen agreement. We will probably be better off not being in the EU as well but only time will tell. If you believe in democracy then you cannot be pro EU and if that is cutting your nose off to spite your face then I`m guilty as charged.

The best thing to do is for the government to tell us that we will be better off

To be fair, I don't really see the point of having a referendum on the terms of Brexit even. For this very reason, most people don't know anything about the single market, customs union, etc.

Pushing 'self-employment' more than anything, no minimum wage and no work necessary to get off the dole and not be included in unemployment figures. Also increasing welfare to work schemes for those claiming JSA and ESA to again reduce the figures for unemployment and sick or disabled benefits and increase the numbers in 'employment'. It's all a statistics fixing scam.

Hahahahaha! Which laws would they be?

Well I was going from memory but a quick Google found this one:

In March 2015, the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015[24] received Royal Assent. On a date to be appointed, s. 153 of the Act will amend the Employment Rights Act 1996, so that exclusivity terms in zero hours contracts will no longer be enforceable, and regulations may specify other circumstances under which employers may not restrict what other work zero hours workers can do.

I thought that you might drag up exclusivity clauses. The reason Tories abolished them was because of Universal Credit. Under previous rules, JSA claimants could not be forced under threat of sanction to sign zero hours contracts.

Under Universal Credit, claimants can be forced under threat of sanction to take on a zero hours contract, but the Tories hit a glitch, what if someone already has a zero hours contract with an exclusivity clause? It would be considered unreasonable to expect a person who has a zero hours contract with an exclusivity clause to take on another zero hours contract, and besides the contract forbids that.

So the Tories abolished exclusivity clauses, now Universal Credit claimants can be forced under threat of sanction to sign an infinite amount of zero hours contracts as exclusivity clauses are abolished.

Exclusivity clauses enable the Tories to sanction more Universal Credit claimants unless they take on X amount of zero hours contracts. It has not been implemented to support workers but to support the sanction regime. You have to read between the lines with the Tories.

Lie you mean?

It's the Tory way.

On the other hand one can easily read it as the 'encouragement if the gig economy' that some like to talk about which in turn sounds an awful lot like Gordon Brown's 'agile workforce' dream where everybody moves about as and when the work is available, which in turn sounds an awful lot like Tebbitts 'on yer bike' stuff... or we can take it as some bizarre roundabout way of farting about with the benefits system because that's what the evil tories always do.

Exclusivity clauses in zero-hours contracts are inherently wrong if there's no liveable retainer being paid, and if it's for minimum-wage stuff then the legislation was long overdue and one wonders how it was that the situation was allowed to persist for such a long time.

The public will just have to accept what ever kind of Brexit the EU grants us.

I fully supported then ban on exclusivity clauses but Zero Hour contracts have their place in the economy. Casual labour with no fixed hours has existed forever, it's just that they were formally called ZHCs in recent years.

There was also nothing wrong with Tebbit's "On your bike". If you were unfortunate to be born in an area with few jobs or opportunities then it seems common sense to move rather than sitting around moaning about it. I did it when I left a small village in the North East 25 years ago and millions of others have been doing it for generations.

Indeed, when the term got popular I had wondered what this new sinister-sounding thing was, only to be disappointed when realising what the fuss was about, and the assumption that an actual contract was only needed because some regulation required it or something.


I've moved around for work too - perhaps another study in workforce mobility is needed, one wonders how much could be fixed simply by the existence of a decently regular 'bus to the next town' service.

And apparently we now need tents to go with our bikes!

The irony. The public want to be free of the "tyranny" (their words, not mine!) of the EU yet the most important thing of all, the deal we get, is what they grant to us!

Or one might see this as proof that we were not in a true partnership? Or file it as 'an expected cost'? Or as 'price worth paying'? Or even 'deficiently worded treaty exit clause'? It's all spin anyway, whether it's tyranny or utopia or 'for all its faults'...

To point out the obvious, during the referendum campaign it was repeatedly pointed out that we could end up significantly worse off if we opted to leave the EU. Despite this the pro-Leave portion of the population basically agreed to give the pro-Leave politicians a free hand to damage their standard of living. As such, it is a bit late for them to complain that they won't accept a Brexit that leaves them worse off, when they voted for it.

This is akin to ignoring all financial advice and giving someone a blank cheque and then getting upset at the amount the person fills in on the cheque.