Mick Hartley

Is the Guardian about to expose itself?

Here's Aditya Chakrabortty's piece at CiF today – Think only low-paid workers get the Sports Direct treatment? You’re wrong.

Running through the debate around Sports Direct is a comforting, dangerous delusion. It is that such horrors are never visited on People Like Us. Victorian workhouses? Staff so terrified of losing their jobs they dare not protest their abuse? Terrible – but (guilty whisper) it only happens to the low-paid and the low-skilled, at dead-end jobs and in left-behind colliery towns. Right?

Wrong. Mike Ashley, with his wad of fifties and his helicopter commutes, makes an easy newspaper grotesque. But it’s his treatment of employees that is the really grotesque thing. And those practices are creeping into the lives of more and more workers – even those with the whitest of collars and the longest string of letters after their names. 

How true. Here's a piece from the latest Private Eye:

Gloating galore at the Guardian, which is claiming the credit for forcing Sports Direct to mend its Dickensian ways.

Shome mishtake? The Guardian did its big undercover hit on Sports Direct’s work practices last December. But back in November 2014, Ed Miliband had named Sports Direct and said it should stop using zero-hours contracts. In April 2015, Channel 4’s Dispatches exposed SD’s harsh working conditions, achieving a two-year ratings high. And in September 2015 the Unite union held protests at 40 Sports Direct locations.

Last month editor Kath Viner emailed Guardian staff about her plan for more coverage of zero-hours contracts: “As projects such as our investigations into Sports Direct, Hermes and gangmasters demonstrate, this is a subject at the heart of our journalism. We are therefore looking for a work correspondent who will be able to write distinctively about work-related issues both inside and outside the workplace. Apply here…”

After completing long application forms, however, several in-house hacks were told they weren’t eligible: the post was “for Guardian staff only”.

Since they work at the Grauniad office and are on the payroll, with set hours and a title, they foolishly thought they were employed by the paper. But the recruiter explained that “by ‘Guardian staff’ I mean staff who are on a permanent or fixed-term contract”. The rebuffed applicants aren’t technically staff because they are on, er, zero-hours contracts.

There are over 100 hacks at the Guardian employed this way. These casuals are also forced to take a month’s unpaid leave every so often to stop them doing two years’ continuous service and thus gaining employment rights. In a splendid example of Grauniad humbug, the heavily pregnant editor of the paper’s “women in leadership” network was recently forced to leave with no maternity pay.

Last week’s announcement of an end to zero-hours contracts at Sports Direct means its casual staff actually have more employment rights than those at the Grauniad. Sounds like a perfect subject for the paper’s new work correspondent!

So what about Chakrabortty's article? Is he finally exposing the Guardian's hypocrisy for what it is?

Fat chance. It's all about staff at Coventry University, who are no longer employed directly by the university, but by commercial subsidiaries. There may well be a case for some serious journalistic enquiries here – but the Guardian is hardly the newspaper to do it.