Comment by varispeed
6 years ago
Here in the UK government is pushing no rights employment under guise of fairer taxation. People providing services will be taxed as employees but will not have any workers' rights, including no right to unionise, no equal pay, no maternity leave and so on. Currently this won't affect existing employees, but from April nothing will stop employers from terminating their staff and issuing new NRE contracts on a take it or leave it basis. What's most bizarre is that even the unions are not too fussed about it, it's like they either don't believe this is actually happening or they just don't care. The legislation is in current Finance Bill and so far has met no resistance and likely is going to pass.
> even the unions are not too fussed about it
That's because it primarily hits contractors, who are typically not unionized and in fact tend to erode union presence.
Abuse of contractor agreements and temp-agencies has already been used for decades to effectively bust unions, that's really nothing new. Mass-rehiring could have been done already a long time ago, and likely was, by and large, where they could avoid the resulting bad press.
> The legislation is in current Finance Bill and so far has met no resistance and likely is going to pass.
Tories have a solid majority, and they are anti-unions as an article of faith. Even if Labour made a stink about it, tabloids would likely ignore it. The most pro-union Labour leader since the '80s spent 5 years being vilified precisely so he couldn't raise this sort of issue.
Workers re-hired on a contract could defend themselves against lack of employment protections by working outside IR35 and providing these protections themselves. The change takes this away as only the client will be able to decide how worker is taxed. This favour agencies over independent workers as agencies have more freedoms what business costs they can deduct from tax and what salaries to pay to their workers. This is a seemingly subtle change, that changes from benign to lethal.