The Guardian’s investigation into self-employed drivers’ contracts at Hermes (PM urged to launch inquiry) and the GMB’s case against Uber (Uber faces court battle, both 20 July) are potent symbols of the challenge posed by the changing nature of jobs. There is a fast-growing army of self-employed and often precarious workers and we need to find ways to ensure they have appropriate financial security and rights.
We can learn a lot from countries as different as the US and India, where co-operatives and unions of self-employed workers have been formed for precisely these reasons. Sometimes in partnership with existing trade unions, sometimes separately, the workers have banded together in order to reduce the costs of essentials like sick-pay insurance, to provide a collective voice to employers and to lobby for government action and recognition.
Freelancers needn’t be alone – and we’re likely to see more and more self-employed workers clubbing together over the coming years.
Ed Mayo
Secretary general, Co-operatives UK
• The assertion that the self-employment arrangements that Hermes has with its couriers has been approved by HMRC as legal is truly worrying but not surprising. HMRC seems to be only too happy to assist companies in the thorny business of trying to avoid any liability for ensuring workers’ rights and protection.
Increasing numbers of jobs are being classified in this way – thus eroding the means by which workers have traditionally, under the cardinal principles of the welfare state, been able to tide themselves and their families over during bad times at work.
I always thought that such avoidance arrangements would easily be classified as bogus. But no, HMRC does not seem to have any disagreement with them. Surely the Labour MPs currently tearing the party apart through their refusal to accept the membership’s choice of leader ought, instead, to be raising hell about how easy it is to exploit and deny the “ordinary people” – whom they claim to represent – the wherewithal to live a decent life.
I know whose side the leader, whom they find so unacceptable, would be on – and it’s not HMRC’s.
Gillian Dalley
London
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