Aditya Chakrabortty writes:
If we learned one thing from Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley today,
it is that he’s not Santa Claus. He enjoyed repeating this message to MPs.
Instead, he’s a hardworking billionaire who just can’t keep on top of
everything in his company.
Employees on wages that were
effectively illegally low? True enough. Temp workers offered permanent jobs in
return for sexual favours? No worse than what happens at Sainsbury’s.
Docking
pay for anyone turning up a minute late? If it happened to one of Ashley’s kids
he wouldn’t be too impressed.
On he went, in a mealy-mouthed
exculpation for utterly immoral behaviour.
You wouldn’t have thought, listening
to the human bulldozer, that he ran a warehouse ruled by fear. Where workers
were expected to walk 20 miles a day and blared at over a tannoy.
Where men too
scared to call in sick instead went in and suffered a stroke. Where ambulances were
called out to deal with births and miscarriages – including a woman who gave
birth in the loos.
All this happened at one of the key sites of the Ashley
business – but to listen to the man, it was all down to overzealous managers
and, besides, he couldn’t be expected to keep an eye on every part of
operations.
Doubtless, the same could be said for how 200 workers at the
company’s Ayrshire warehouse had been sacked with only 15 minutes’
notice.
Or how staff were dealt harsh punishment just for “excessive chatting”
and taking long toilet breaks.
There comes a point at which such
barbarous treatment is so widespread and so enduring that it can no longer be
considered a mere slip or managerial faux pas: it is an integral part of the
business model.
That is the case with Sports Direct. Ashley has made millions
because he got away with pushing staff to breaking point.
Yet MPs continued to treat Ashley
as if he were a businessman, not a bull-necked bully in a suit.
Doubtless,
they’ll give similar deference to Sir Philip Green when he turns up at parliament next
week to explain the ransacking of BHS.
Green, don’t forget, was
given his knighthood by Tony Blair and appointed an adviser to David Cameron.
Parliamentary bear-baiting such as we saw today shows us
what Ashley and Green and Fred Goodwin (another Blair knight) and the rest are
like.
But it only happens after these people have been given their honours and
made their millions – and after something so rotten has been exposed in their
business that MPs feel obliged to dish out an obligatory round-housing.
What would be meaningful
parliamentary action?
Calling for the prosecution of anyone paying illegally
low wages. Banning the exploitation of temp workers that British business has
normalised.
Most of all, breaking the habit of British politicians to treat any
spiv with a spreadsheet as a business guru.
Not all businesses are the same.
Not all deserve to be called businesses, if by that term we mean running firms
that actually pay their way in society.
Our politicians make no such
distinctions.
They use our money to build factories for businesses, who pop in
and then jet off. They spend millions building roads for distribution centres, as
the Welsh government did for Amazon.
Most of all they use taxpayer billions to
top up poverty pay.
I’ll believe our politicians mean
business when they define what a business actually is – and act accordingly.
Until then: no, Mr Ashley, you’re not Father Christmas. Nor are you a
businessman.
You’re a greedy, immoral man who has pocketed millions from treating
humans like battery hens.
Certain Labour MPs were angling for a donation that thankfully Jeremy would never accept.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to hear them try and argue for accepting it.
Delete