Bryony Gordon
What happened to common decency?
Standing outside the Supreme Court this week, Charlie Mullins behaved like a man who had just been the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice.
The millionaire owner of a plumbing company, who arrived in his chauffeur-driven, £300,000 Bentley – chauffeurdriven, presumably from his £5million penthouse – whinged and wailed to anybody who would listen about how unfairly he had been treated by an employment judge who had ruled against him in an ongoing battle between Pimlico Plumbers and heating engineer Gary Smith.
Smith claimed he was dismissed after he had a heart attack and had the audacity to ask if he could go down to a three-day week; Pimlico Plumbers argued that it couldn’t have dismissed him because he was never employed by them in the first place. The plumber, they said, was self-employed, a beneficiary of the so-called “gig economy”, which now rules supreme.
Balderdash, said Smith, who pointed to the branded uniform, the van he had to drive emblazoned with their logo, and the tracker in said van – not to mention the contract that restricted his ability to compete with it for business should their “relationship” be terminated. Lord Wilson, the judge, sided with Smith, as had three previous judges (this was the fourth attempt by Pimlico Plumbers to overturn the ruling).
“It’s not over yet,” growled Mr Mullins cartoonishly, a grown man-child behaving like a five-year-old who has been told umpteen times by its parent that there will be no more ice cream. The stunningly preserved chief executive may be 65 but, just like a child, he is yet to grasp that there is often a yawning chasm between what you want and what is right.
And so it was that, immediately after the ruling, he announced that he was considering taking an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Because Mr Mullins’s right to behave like a complete and utter douchebag obviously trumps the right of his plumbers to take some time off when they fall seriously ill.
In the endless rush to the future, it sometimes feels as if we are in danger of losing touch with the here and now. Mullins says that the courts have missed an opportunity to bring employment law into the 21st century, where the gig economy dominates. But, really, the likes of Uber, Deliveroo and Pimlico Plumbers want to drag us back to Dickensian times – though one might argue that even Bob Cratchit had more rights than the average Joe pedalling some lukewarm takeaway up a hill for the minimum wage.
Sham self-employment is all the rage right now. Companies claim to be giving people the opportunity to work flexibly and have “portfolio” careers, which is just a posh way of saying “working three jobs to pay the rent”.
Mr Mullins, like many other modern business owners, is so focused on profit that he appears to have forgotten all sense of common decency. One of his plumbers had a heart attack and asked to cut his hours, and all Mullins cares about is whether or not it might set a precedent for any of his other plumbers who might be planning on having a heart attack. Kindness? What’s that? A new type of fabric conditioner or something?
On the anniversary of the Grenfell tragedy this week, the Bishop of Kensington spoke about the need for more empathy in society. The Rt Rev Dr Graham Tomlin, whose diocese includes the tower, said that the compassion shown in the immediate aftermath of the disaster is what we should show each other at all times.
He is right. Something about British society is becoming hard and cynical. Last week, one news organisation paid more attention to the handful of Grenfell fraudsters than the news there is to be a police investigation into the fire brigade advice that led to residents “staying put” in the burning tower – and 72 of them perishing. An entire year has passed since those people died needlessly, in a building that turned into a tinder box thanks, some think, to corporate cost-cutting. One year on, many of the survivors have still not been rehoused.
We are, on the whole, a compassionate nation – one that created the first ever free health service; one that is admired the world over for its generosity when it comes to giving aid to less fortunate countries. Kindness is our greatest quality, our most enduring legacy. We must not forget about it now.