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Thread: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

  1. #81
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Point of note, according to The Last Kingdom, which has stuff written down so it must be true: Viking was an act, not a race. The norse people going on raids were just Danes, Norges etc, until they went on Viking raids.

    Edit: I didn't write that very well. A Viking was a man who left his family to go raiding for riches and/or pleasure. Viking the verb was the act of doing so.

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    Not a good person scaryjim's Avatar
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    ... edit: Ah got you, you're saying the Celts are distinct from the Vikings, misread earlier. ...
    And also the Danes are distinct from the Norse, but not from the Germanic, or specificly not from the Saxons, who are from further south. But given we derivde England and English from the Angles, true Englishman are in fact Germans, and are definitely not British.

    My familial roots on both sides are Celtic (Irish on my mum's side, a somewhat more distant Scots on my dad's), but I imagine there's plenty of Anglo-Saxon in there too, tbh. And probably a bit of Norman, while we're at it!

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    The late but legendary peterb - Onward and Upward peterb's Avatar
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    Isn't Norse the same thing as the Norwegian descent Vikings?

    And I'll see your Wales and raise you an Isle of Man

    edit: Ah got you, you're saying the Celts are distinct from the Vikings, misread earlier.

    Proudly not very anglo-saxon here
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    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by Smudger View Post
    Point of note, according to The Last Kingdom, which has stuff written down so it must be true: Viking was an act, not a race. The norse people going on raids were just Danes, Norges etc, until they went on Viking raids.

    Edit: I didn't write that very well. A Viking was a man who left his family to go raiding for riches and/or pleasure. Viking the verb was the act of doing so.
    So basically Ibiza is full of Vikings?

  5. #85
    OilSheikh
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
    While some of the above might be a bit extreme,
    Not really.
    The Europeans are essentially foreigners, who have been living here without visas thanks to our membership of the EU. Now, when that relation officially ends, they will no longer be eligible for all the priviledges and will have to adhere to our immigration laws that we have for foreigners. If they want to stay here, they must obtain visas. Most of the things I have mentioned already apply to foreigners.

  6. #86
    OilSheikh
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Oh, and one more thing, I want Uni fees to be 3 grand a year for Home students like it used to be. 9 grand is a joke and Uni education has indeed become a luxury.

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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by opel80uk View Post
    I've heard this argument trotted out numerous times, but it's a fallacy. It is true that perhaps that company took on the contracts because it could be done via zero-hours contracts, but if zero-hour contracts were banned, are you suggesting that the work wouldn't get done, by someone else, somewhere else, using conventional contracts? Is the work such that only zero hour contracts permits the work, and if they were banned the jobs wouldn't exist to carry out the same work elsewhere, albeit not with that particular company? I say that implication is nonsense.

    And whilst a zero hour contract may suit you perfectly, it is clear that for far too many people they can be, and in many cases are, exploitative and one sided. It's for that reason that New Zealand, hardly a bastian of social awareness, has banned them. And the UK should (although of course won't) follow suit.
    it is not a fallacy, but you are extrapolating what I said to something I didn't.

    I said, very carefully, that THAT company would not and could not have taken the contract. I didn't want to go into too much superfluous detail but not only would that company not have taken the contract, but no similar company would have, or could have, either. The reason is that the work was national, but sporadic. Elements of it were planned ahead, to varying extents. Overall, it was about a 5-year program, in several phases, worth tens of millions but the part of it I'm talking about was one important but narrow strand of it.

    Ultimately, the whole project would obviously still have gone ahead. but that element of it would have had to be done in a different way. The number of companies capable of doing the work was very limited, and due to regulatory and legal requirements, barriers to competitive entry quite high. Getting authority to do the work is not straight-forward and takes time. Doing it without authorisation would not only invalidate parts of the work, but would actually be illegal. There are companies capable of doing some parts of the work but not others. Those capable of doing the regulatory parts aren't in the market for the other parts. And the whole project required national coverage, and for parts of it, a guaranteed response time which means having an adequate pool of local qualified staff available within viable travel time,

    It is therefore a balance between having enough staff in, or near to, every part of the country to cover what by definition is an unknown level of demand that can "spike". The solution is to have a small number of full-time salaried staff covering base demand, but a pool of geographically diverse zero-hour staff that can do the jobs planned a couple of weeks in advance, but also cover those unpredictable spikes when the full-time staff are already committed on another job.

    As that large contract was going to get done, one way or another, all the work would have to be done some other way and there are companies that can do this part but not that part, or that part but not the regulated part, or that can do it in some parts of the country but not others, or that will cover the whole country for the planned-ahead part but don't have the resources to cover the "spike" for the bit with defined response times.

    The company with the zero-hour staff structured it that way becsuse there was a demand with no other supplier able to offer a one-stop solution, which was what the ultimate customer wanted. The ultimate customer wanted that one-stop supplier, but they also wanted it from a company small enough to be agile in responding to their needs, and very keen to jump to their needs in a way that large companies can't or won't. Their only other alternative was to split the work into several components and contract it out to several different companies, which they were keen to not do for several reasons. One reason was that part of that required using a very large supplier several times the size of the customer, for whom the customer was only a modest-sized customer, and with whom immediate experience told the customer they were not the top priority.

    Summing that up, no direct competitor existed. The full national coverage requires either a very large company, where the customer wasn't a high priority, or a smaller versatile, agile company. But that smaller company cannot meet all the demands, nationally, with full-time staff because most of them would be sitting on their hands, twiddling their thumbs (if that's possible simultaneously) when work wasn't spiking.

    The problem is that the work involved a specialist element, that only "authorised" people can supply, on a national basis, without there being sufficient workload to justify sufficient national full-time staff to do it. It would require a company large enough to have adequate full-time staff nationally, doing other things, but with sufficient of them trained and "authorised", nationally, to do the specialised bit.

    There's nothing to stop such a large company doing this, but there isn't one that does it, probably because the specialused bit is too small-scale and tightly focussed to be worth doing. Which indeed, is how the company I'm talking about evolved - when just such a large player set up a department to do this, but decided it wasn't worth their while and closed it down.

    The end customer would have had to employ two or three different suppliers, each doing parts, and both the additional cost, lack of attentiveness and administrative overhead did not appeal. The ONLY way to supply the service as it was configured was the way it was done, with zero hour contracts.

    I know all or almost all of the 45-50 zero hour staff well. Most wanted to be on zero-hour contracts. Either they were retired and wanted to fit modest amounts of work round other interests, or like me, did other things and used this to avoid having all eggs in one basket. There were a few that wanted full-time work and used this as a stop-gap. The way work was scheduled, those people got more calls than those that wanted just a job here, job there. They actually earned more than they would have in full-time work they were equipped for, as this contract stuff was well-paid, but of course it didn't offer the securitu SOME needed. Which perfectly suited those that wsnted more work, and those that didn't, which was the vast majority.

    And that last point is why zero-hour contracts suit some people. The employer is not committed to provide work when it doesn't come in, AND the employee isn't committed to a level of work, or to work at predegined times, unless they want to.

    Had that firm insisted those on zero hour contracts went full time, almost all would have quit, including me. Going full time would mean giving up other things, which I would not have done. Another person on a zero-hour contract was a retired relative who didn't want to fully retire but certainly didn't want to go back full time. Yet another was a guy that had fairly heavy "carer" commitments and couldn't do full-time, but could do a job here or there without ongoing committment. All would have walked out rather than go full-time, which the employer couldn't have offered anyway even if we had wanted them to, which we didn't.

    If we had gone full-time, I'd bet that, per hour, we'd have earned a lot less, too. That, in some cases, is the trade-off of zero hour contracts LIKE THIS - lack of security for higher pay rates and agility of choice.

    And yes, I know that that's not the case for minimum wage staff in a burger joint, which is why I have no problem with a regulatory framework that limits the clearly prevalent abusive end of zero hour. My point is that not all zero hour contracts are abusive, and a small but significant proportion of people find they work well, and suit their needs perfectly.

  8. #88
    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by OilSheikh View Post
    Not really.
    The Europeans are essentially foreigners, who have been living here without visas thanks to our membership of the EU. Now, when that relation officially ends, they will no longer be eligible for all the priviledges and will have to adhere to our immigration laws that we have for foreigners. If they want to stay here, they must obtain visas. Most of the things I have mentioned already apply to foreigners.
    But OilSheikh you are European. We are part of the continent of Europe, just like Americans are part of the Americas, Asians of Asia, Africans of Africa, and penguins of Antarctica.

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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by OilSheikh View Post
    Oh, and one more thing, I want Uni fees to be 3 grand a year for Home students like it used to be. 9 grand is a joke and Uni education has indeed become a luxury.
    Or go back to the days of fees being 100% paid by government and students getting a "grant", for which a means-tested parental contribution was required, towards food, living expenses, etc.

    But then, you're also going back to the days when 3% to 5% of school leavers went to uni,instead of the 45% going these days.

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    The late but legendary peterb - Onward and Upward peterb's Avatar
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Well, I'm convinced that OilSheikh must be a Roman, looking at his posted location.

    So get thee hence
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    So basically Ibiza is full of Vikings?
    Exactly, they loved a good rave.

    Reach for the lasers

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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
    it is not a fallacy, but you are extrapolating what I said to something I didn't.
    No, IMO, I think any fair evaluation of what you said would easily be able to detect that the implication was that if it were not for zero hour contracts, the jobs wouldn't exist full stop. And in fairness, it's not just you that does that, most defenders of zero hour contracts openly state that those types of contracts create jobs in themselves, as if it is only the contract that allows the work to be done, when in fact most would still be carried out regardless.

    But irrespective, that is almost beside the point. The example you gave about yourself is indeed one of where zero hour contracts seem to suit everyone involved but as far as I can see, there is no reason why, if zero hour contracts didn't exist, that that type of short term work couldn't be facilitated using the sub contractor system. The problem with the sub contractor is it more complex and there is greater administrative work involved. So, to suit business, people who are exploited at the lower end of zero hour contracts are effectively the collateral damage of a system that allows companies and people like yourself to benefit from the flexibility they offer. Whilst the contracts exist, there is no type of regulation that would curb the abuse (I.e you can't say McDonalds can't use them, but the crowd you work for can and it would be almost impossible to prove that someone is using the amount of hours that they gives an employee on a zero hours contract as a stick), and you know that as well as I do. So yes, it may be incredibly inconvenient for you and the person who employs you if they were banned altogether, but you have options open to you both to work around that, that someone being exploited working on the minimum wage wouldn't.

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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    I can see the objection to an exclusive zero hours contract, but some of my work is piecework. I charge for a piece of work, regardless of how long it takes, and provided I meet the deadline, how long it takes is irrelevant.

    But f any ' conventional' worker can have three or four zero hours contracts, they are free to pick and choose whichever one they want to pick up at the time. Felixibility.

    So if someone wants to enter into a zero hours contract, that is there choice.

    That isn't to say that emp.oyment law shouldn't be ammended to give both workers and employers some protection, but used correctly, they offer flexibility in the workplace for both employer and employee.

    However this is getting off the original topic - but if you want to start a thread on zero hours contracts, I'll happily copy these posts over to it.
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
    ... The employer is not committed to provide work when it doesn't come in, AND the employee isn't committed to a level of work, or to work at predegined times, unless they want to. ...
    I'm intrigued - under these contracts were you able to refuse to do hours when requested, or did they tie you to working if you were asked to? Because I can see the latter being problematic for essentially anyone other than the retired or independently wealthy, and otherwise surely the same function would be filled by a pool of freelance contract staff....? Pretty much all of the benefits you describe for zero-hour contracts are fulfilled by freelance work, and AFAIK there's nothing stopping a company - or even a public body - having an internal register of preferred suppliers that would serve the same purpose...

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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by peterb View Post
    So if someone wants to enter into a zero hours contract, that is there choice.
    Is it though? IDK but couldn't someone be sanctioned if they didn't take a zero hours contract.

  17. #96
    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    Re: Now that the dust is begining to settle... what do you want from UK / EU treaty

    Quote Originally Posted by Corky34 View Post
    Is it though? IDK but couldn't someone be sanctioned if they didn't take a zero hours contract.
    Of course not. No more than you could be sanctioned for deciding not to take up a job or contract offer.

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