Ashley Under Fire AGAIN

In today's Daily Mail there is an article concerning Sports Direct and it's use of zero hour contracts. Apparently they employ 16,000 out of their 20,000 staff on these type of contracts and now Ed Milliband has come out and said he intends to stop this practice, should he get into power.
" Victorian Management Practices " is his take on the use by SD.
I somehow think Ashley doesn't give a damn.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...reet-firm-Victorian-management-practices.html

 

He's right, but unfortunately, fat Mike will be far more 'successful' than Milliband could even dream of.

Also, it's the usual party political tosh being rolled out. Ed is no saint himself.


"But last night Tories accused Mr Miliband of hypocrisy, as several Labour-run councils employ zero-hours staff.
Doncaster Council, the authority in Mr Miliband’s constituency, has admitted it employs 300 people on the contracts.
Freedom of Information inquiries show that in 2013, Derby Council employed 1,333 people on the contracts, Gateshead 1,285 and Bury 3,418. All are run by Labour.

Tory business minister Matthew Hancock said: ‘Another rehashed policy from Ed Miliband can’t hide the fact that he still hasn’t got an economic plan … We’re already tackling the abuse of zero-hours contracts – after 13 years of Labour doing absolutely nothing about it.’

 

Milliband is an unelectable spineless goon. It's all a load of ****e.

 

JD Wetherspoon 24000 employees on zero hours contracts, all major high street stores and supermarkets use them, my employment sector hotels and hospitality has just under half of all employees on zero hours contracts, councils, the NHS and education sector make use of them extensively, Miliband is the worst kind of socialist, always on about the ordinary people when he has no idea what it is really like in the real world, quite laughable when like Blair they proffess to be football fans etc, at least the Tories don't pretend to be something other than they are, Miliband down with the have nots as he picks up his £17 loaf of artisan bread on his way home to his £2 million pound 2 up 2 down.

 

Ridiculous. Ashley is operating within the law. Doing absolutely nothing wrong. These contracts are necessary in certain sectors too.

 

Pros and Cons.

Miliband is surely pulling the p***.
The last Labour Government had 13 Years in power to do something about Zero Hours and chose to do f*** all about it.
A bit late now - the horse has bolted.

 

Ashley is doing nothing wrong under the current law, but the current law is an ass. These contracts (in their current form) are exploitative and used immorally. Too many companies use them to avoid employment responsibilities, and where they are needed it should be illegal to insist on exclusive rights to someone's employment. Whether SD are doing anything wrong morally is another matter. I come down on the side of saying that it is immoral in its current format.

 

What's the point of 0 hour contracts in retail? You know when you get busy periods, and when you don't. You know how many staff you need (High Street stores are apparently notorious for breaking laws regarding how many staff are in to open/close a shop etc), so why not contract them to, I dunno, certain hours to suit? Or must they have a squad to select from they can rotate around so they can go for domestic and international honours?

My last employment gave me a 6 month temporary contract, 39 hours a week. 18 months of continuous employment later, so 12 after the contract had expired, I only got offered a new contract because I pointed out to the hierarchy above my manager that I'd not seen a contract since. It wasn't written in the contract that they could do this, but they were just rolling/extending the contract every month without my permission. Of course, this suited for a while, as jobs are scarce these days because all three main parties have decided to put back retirement ages to prevent people getting pensions and leaving jobs young people would get. When I later told them to f*** off for pissing me about, they said I had to work 4 weeks notice

 

The only point of them is to increase profits for the companies at the expense of ordinary workers. I was a senior manager in supermarkets for ten years (Sainsbury's, Tesco & Asda) before zero hour contracts were used so widely. Predicting the hours we needed to contract and boost (overtime agreed in advance) was probably the hardest part of the job. If you were going to get it badly wrong it was always preferable to have too many hours rather than too few as when service dropped we lost customers. The ideal tho was to be very very slightly under what was required as a slight shortfall saved money but a small shortfall could be picked up by people working harder in the short term. This meant though that at times we lost money as we had guessed too many people were needed. If they were contracted we couldn't send them home. If it was agreed overtime then it was difficult to send them home. The companies still made massive profits throughout this time. Now these companies can send people home without warning, or even tell them not to come in. They cannot look elsewhere for work as they are required to be available. It is lazy and exploitative management.

 

I think the biggest thing is the change in practice has lead to an unbalanced system. Take where I worked. Half the staff had been working there before the changes in contracts came in, so they had time/half stipulations for over-time and unsocial hours, set-in stone hours, and would not change them under any circumstances. The other half, all young graduates or students and newly hired, were on these "temporary" contracts that they would extended without permission each month (oh, and unsocial hours counted as those between 4.30am-5.30am for us, even though we had 3am-12 shifts I pointed out they had been breaking their own company policy, because they had't paid any temporary contract employee extra for that unsocial time, so they had to go back and calculate it all for like a year mwahahahahahahaha... the fact that made my stuck up twat of a manager have to rifle through files to set things "right" meant so much more than the £20 extra they paid me and my co-workers). We were kicked around the shop, doing earlies then lates, lates then earlies (several times they broke the law regarding the "working time act" and 11 hour gaps. I'd been accepted to law school at the time, and they knew that (what they didn't know was that I later decided not to do it), so whenever they tried it with me or colleagues, I wrote down the law they were breaking and they quickly scrabbled to change it hahahahahaha).

My favourite thing about Supermarkets and High Street retail chains, is they have bought "self-service" machines for £10,000 a pop rather than pay a guy £12,000 a year (who does more than just sit on a til), even though they need two people to be in the vicinity, standing there, at all times because the things are so temperamental, even though the vast majority of customers prefer actual personal customer service.

The company I worked for was so "poor" (yes, I realise you twats purposefully do it) at scheduling staff, that we were always too short to even do staff breaks, and one person would be left in a sizeable store at peak times. 97% would stand in a long line going out the shop to be served by little old me, ignoring the self-service. The 3% that noticed they were there would either do something wrong, or the machine would pack-up, leaving it shouting "help is on the way"... Ermmm, no bud, help is stuck behind the till serving this mammoth line of people you wanted to avoid. I used to piss management off on purpose, as they had targets for self-service transactions. Whenever I was left alone, I would turn them all off. 3 hours later a manager would come swanning in and blow his top because the self-service was off

Glad I got a proper job FFS

 

Do you work in Royston Vasey still?