New legislation around zero-hours working risks enveloping agency workers and pushing companies into promoting ‘false self-employment’, a parliamentary committee has heard.
The House of Commons Business and Trade Committee inquiry on the Employment Rights Bill was told by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) Neil Carberry chief executive that agency workers should be exempt from much of the new legislation covering zero-hours workers as agency workers had a “fundamentally different, two-sided, flexible model of engagement”.
The committee held its final session of the inquiry into Make Work Pay, earlier this week. In addition to Carberry, it heard from senior executives at companies such as Deliveroo, Frasers Group, Evri and Uniqlo, who faced questioning over allegations of unfair practices. The MPs will soon make their recommendations to parliament regarding changes to the Bill.
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Carberry said: “It feels like there is a real risk of, in an attempt to avoid evasion by direct employers, bringing one million temps into this regime [will be] driving some of the behaviour we have seen reported in the past months where some direct employers are using platform sites to engage people who are patently workers as self-employed. The real enemy is false self-employment, that is our primary concern about the reality of the Bill.”
Umbrella companies should be the subject of more regulation, as they were the source of many unethical practices, Carberry said, adding that the Employment Rights Bill was failing to address this. Meanwhile, the onus for compensation for shift cancellations should be shared by agencies’ clients, he said.
The committee of MPs also heard from whistleblowers revealing poor practices applied to zero-hours workers.
Delivery firm Evri, according to anonymous sources, had misled parliament over inconsistent pay rates and “moving the goalposts”, and was “renowned for their computer system that never gets wages correct and robs thousands of pounds off couriers every month with no phone system to fix things”.
Hugo Martin, director of legal affairs at Evri, said he did not recognise this evidence and had pay rates that ensured couriers were paid above the national minimum wage and remained with the company for lengthy periods.
Deliveroo’s group director of policy Paul Bedford emphasised that the Supreme Court had found that his firm’s workers were genuinely self-employed but faced questions over the way Deliveroo continued to allow the use of substitutes – a system whereby riders could subcontract their work to other people, some of whom may not have the right to work in the UK.
Bedford explained how substitutes were commonplace across many sectors in which self-employed people worked. Deliveroo had implemented registration and recognition systems to improve practice in this area, he said.
“Since we introduced the substitute registration feature we have had around 6,000 substitute accounts registered,” said Bedford. “That is about 5% of the total number of riders that we have. That is the number of substitutes. We have stopped around 2,500 substitute accounts from being finalised.”
Paddy Lillis, general secretary at the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) said he welcomed the Bill “in its entirety. I think that it is going to be transformational for millions of workers across the UK.”
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