Uber, Hermes and Deliveroo questioned on employment practices

UKParliament

On Tuesday 10 October at 10.45am, the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee will question representatives from Uber, Hermes and Deliveroo about their current employment practices and the potential impact of the Taylor Review and whether more can be done to provide high quality work and improve access to employment rights and benefits.

Witnesses
Andrew Byrne, Head of Public Policy, Uber
Hugo Martin, Director of Legal Affairs, Hermes
Dan Warne, Managing Director UK and Ireland, Deliveroo

Watch the session live or catch-up later on Parliament TV.

sangie595

Of course more can be done - Parliament can act to prevent the abuse of zero hours contracts and worker status. Asking bad employers nicely to be better employers has never worked. This is simply an excuse for the government to say that they are doing something about these sorts of abuses - which exist in many other employment sectors too- when in fact they wish to do nothing about them.

But if they are struggling to come up with a plan, here's a hint... Get rid of worker status altogether and make everyone who works for an employer an employee with full access to employment rights. Reduce the time for unfair dismissal claims back to six months - that's enough time to allow an employer to a assess whether someone is good enough, and still enabled them to dismiss if they have a fair reason to do so. Strengthen the laws around the definition of self employed contractors so that where people genuinely want to enter into such a relationship, they are able to do so without duress from employers seeking to avoid their legal responsibilities.