Covid has highlighted injustices in the workplace – now we need action

Workers’ rights cited by a City investor as a reason to shun a tech flotation? What strange dream is this? Pinch me. I need to wake up.

But no, this is no illusion, no wild imagining. It actually happened. Deliveroo’s treatment of its nominally self-employed riders is not the only reason Aviva is passing on the tech firm’s float. But it was high up on the list, and the money manager went public with its concerns too.

There were similar rumblings from other big investors, keen to demonstrate that their commitment to ESG (that’s environmental, social and governance) issues amounts to more than just PR, which is often how it has seemed.

This wasn’t the only striking development in the world of work over the last week. Change may be coming to Wall Street, where the high priests of finance oversee some of the western world’s most brutally competitive workplaces, which regularly lead to burnout among staff and have even, on occasion, been the cause of suicides.

Citigroup’s new CEO Jane Fraser informed the bank’s 210,000 employees that she was banning internal video calls on Fridays as part of moves to improve bankers’ work-life balance.

The 28 May has, meanwhile, been designated as “Citi Reset Day” to allow workers to decompress and restore their pandemic battered psyches. She’s even encouraged them to book more holidays.

Citi’s move followed the ongoing controversy at Goldman Sachs, where junior workers are rebelling against 95-hour work weeks and calling for change. “The firm” has taken steps towards that, although CEO David Sullivan’s call to “go the extra mile” for clients, while acknowledging the problem and promising to hire more staff, rather suggested that they are of the baby variety.

This last week was capped by Nationwide Building Society unveiling its “work anywhere” plan.

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Other companies are similarly acquiescing to staff requests for more flexible “hybrid” working arrangements, where they spend only part of the week in the office, although as I have written, a recent survey of business leaders (by KPMG) found there’s been a slowdown in plans to cut space of late.

That would be the same KPMG that parted company with UK chairman Bill Michael after he told consultants to “stop whining” in a Zoom call.

Is all this evidence of Covid catalysing a revolution in the world of work? Are bosses finally having to learn to treat their employees less as commodities – or human resources as the saying goes – and more like human beings?

Well, up to a point. If you look at the examples I cited above, what’s notable about them is that, with the exception of Deliveroo, they all involve primarily white-collar companies with relatively or very well paid employees whose services they often have to compete for. And I doubt Citi, or Goldman, are ever going to be cuddly places to work.

But the picture is far less optimistic for those in what we used to call “blue-collar” occupations, especially those in the gig economy.

The pressure on Deliveroo to change the conditions under which its riders work is primarily coming not from City fund managers but from riders bringing legal action with the assistance of unions. The company has been pushing back hard against them, fighting tooth and nail against attempts to force it to offer its riders basic workers’ rights such as the minimum wage, holiday and sick pay.

It has argued that this model is different from that of ride-hailing app Uber, which recently lost a case brought by drivers seeking the same rights. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Uber accepted the ruling. It had little choice. But while it would seem good news for its drivers, its interpretation of it could see another case brought against it because drivers are not going to get paid while waiting to be paired with passengers.

Asda’s mostly female checkout workers, meanwhile, celebrated another victory on Friday, in their similarly long-running battle for equal pay with largely male warehouse workers. The Supreme Court ruled they performed comparable roles. But, there’s still a long way to go.

There are similar cases involving several other supermarkets.

Checkout workers, remember, have been daily putting themselves at risk through the pandemic.

Talking of which, just last week I wrote about a TUC survey that found more than half of managers are refusing to give their staff paid time off to get vaccinated, which is not only callous but also as good a case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face as I’ve seen for a while.

And don’t even get me started on care workers, more than three-quarters of whom earn less than the living wage according to the Living Wage Foundation.

It’s clear that Covid has sparked a long-overdue conversation about the way we work, it’s maybe even led to some thinking on the part of richly remunerated CEOs, at least in industries employing office workers.

The moves towards home working, which in many cases also means flexible working, the pandemic has served up are largely welcomed.

But there are still questions about how firms will choose to manage this as the UK reopens. This is an area where unions could actually assist, but resistance towards recognising them remains widespread.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak, displaying typically backward Tory thinking, actually went so far as to warn that people may quit if “forced to work from home”. He’s obviously running scared of the consequences for town centre economies of more home working but he’s not going to help them by trying out a latter-day impersonation of King Canute. The tide is firmly against him.

More widely, the desire for a more enlightened work culture is clearly strong. The government Sunak serves in once promised to “protect and enhance” workers’ rights after Brexit. That has so far proved to be little more than a mirage.

There’s an opening here for the Labour Party. It has been active in the field of NHS pay, an easy win given the miserable pay rise its workers have been offered, but it could stand to do more on wider workplace issues.

Pointing up the obvious Tory failings in this area ought to play well in the “red wall”, where insecure employment is rife and employers can be nasty, but also in the university towns and metropolitan areas where the party is strong. It is something that would probably play very well across a Covid-tired country.

The conversation that’s opened up in recent days and weeks is surely welcome, but, per the old Elvis song, we could do with “a little more action”, particularly on behalf of those in the sort of roles where pay packages are light but the risks taken during the pandemic have been very heavy indeed.