Holding power to account is a core responsibility of being an MP. It is all the more important when so often ordinary men and women in an insecure world have few other ways of protecting their interests, above all at work. So to see Mike Ashley, founder and chief executive of Sports Direct, blustering out his astonishment at the experiences of his workers must have been some slight compensation for the exploited of the Shirebrook warehouse. These experiences included earning less than the legal minimum, being penalised on the most flimsy of excuses, and so intimidated that they failed to take time off work when they needed it and ended up, on at least one occasion, giving birth in a warehouse toilet.
The MPs’ report, published today, is tough. It describes workers treated “without dignity or respect”, “a particularly bad example of a business that exploits its workers in order to maximise its profits”, responsible for “some appalling working practices”. Mr Ashley, they say, must be held responsible. All this is good, but not good enough. What happens at Sports Direct, where – as we have reported this week – its stores as well as its warehouses are under investigation by HMRC for not paying the minimum wage, would probably not have emerged at all without the Guardian’s investigation last year. The problem is not so much gaps in the law as a shortage of resources to enforce it at a time when the low-pay, low-productivity employment model is spreading, undermining incentives to invest in new machinery or equipment to boost output, fuelling a hire-and-fire culture. Two years ago, a migrant advisory committee report found HMRC had so few minimum-wage inspectors that an employer could expect to be visited about once every 250 years. It is illegal to fire a woman for being pregnant but a report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission found one in nine women was either dismissed, made redundant or felt forced to leave during pregnancy. The only recourse exploited workers have is to bring an appeal to an employment tribunal. Since 2013 that has cost more than £1,000 in some cases. Not surprisingly there has been a precipitous fall of 70% in hearings.
Individual cases like Sports Direct are compelling in themselves; but they are also illustrations of a trend that already goes beyond low-skilled work. Casualisation, insecurity and low pay are spreading into what used to be middle-class jobs. The government boasts of the number of people in work. But politicians should contemplate the consequences for the state of a nation many of whose workers earn too little to pay tax, or to save for the future.
