GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

‘gig’ economy workers, don’t know when they are going to get work from one

day to the next. So lots and lots of examples where the ‘gig’ economy does not

work for union members. We have got to put to bed the myth that the ‘gig’

economy works for everyone and that is where there is a problem with the

motion and I will come on to our stance on the motion in a second. The motion

just does not seem firm enough on saying that we have an opposition to

exploitative practices within the ‘gig’ economy. We have got to be absolutely

firm as a movement that that is our starting point, that if you are an exploitative

‘gig’ employer we are against you and we will fight you. The proposition refers

to help to getting people into work. Yes, there may be some examples where

people can get into work through the ‘gig’ economy, but if you remember a few

years ago there used to be an organisation called Remploy. Remploy gave

disabled people proper, decent jobs that they could rely on for work. Remploy

has now gone. Are we saying that we take Remploy away and replace it with

the ‘gig’ economy? I do not think that is where we want to be or where we

should be on behalf of those particular workers.

Of course, it is always a dilemma for unions. What do you do when a good

employer is insistent on doing a bad thing? We have all been in that situation.

Equally, what do you do when a bad employer, like Uber, wants to do a good

thing. It may be a good thing that Uber wants to encourage people who may

struggle to get back to work. But we have to have a response as a movement

to those situations and I am not sure that this proposition necessarily gives us

the right direction with that. There is a big if here and I do not think we can be

quite sure how big the if is, but if some ‘gig’ employers can do a good thing

then we should be all in favour of that, but the big if and the big unknown is

how many of them are actually coming at it from that direction and how many

are coming at it from the direction of exploiting working people and exploiting

our members. My suspicion is that for every one person that you can show

that has benefitted from being in the ‘gig’ economy, I will show you a hundred,

probably show you a thousand people that have been exploited in other areas,

so we have got to be careful that we do not support the few at the cost of the

many.

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