These two topics are somewhat related but not entirely so, so perhaps ought to be two separate ideas but I think that we need to have a discussion about corporate fraud and the fact that it isn’t a criminal matter.
Withholding of wages
The first point I would like to raise is the intentional withholding of wages, or monies owed to employees/contractors. Right now, if you steal £10 from the cash register of your employer, it is not only a criminal offence, but is treated more harshly than otherwise because you are considered to be in a position of trust. However, if your employer decides to arbitrarily deduct £10 from your paycheque, you have to sue them, and it almost certainly isn’t worth it.
I think that this asymmetry in the law is problematic. I’ve spent some time trying to work out what the principle is here, and I think that it is a fraud principle. That in the second scenario, your employer has extracted work from you on the promise of money that they had no intention of paying you. I think that the same concept applies to contractors. If you decide not to pay your wedding caterer after the big day, or you decide not to pay the builder after they built your conservatory, the same principle applies. As such, my proposal is to make it a specific criminal offence to extract work from someone on the promise of payment when you had no intention or no reasonable expectation of being able to pay the promised monies.
One of my worries in this was what to do about disputes over labour standards (i.e. if you think that the conservatory was shoddy and as such you shouldn’t have to pay). In that case, I think that you should be required to bring a civil claim to court and put up the money that you contractually owed the workman in trust to demonstrate your intention to pay. If the court determines that they didn’t do a good job, you cannot face criminal action and get the keep the money, otherwise the workman gets the money from the trust.
This would create parity between employer and employee and the risk of jail-time for business owners or managers would discourage bad behaviour.
Ghost Jobs
Similarly, ghost jobs are a serious problem right now and are another type of corporate fraud. In the US, less than half of all advertised jobs get filled. The Guadian reported that 40% of companies run fake job adverts in the UK. The other common thing is companies advertising externally when they already have an internal candidate who is getting the job come hell or high water, but this is slightly different.
The reasons given for making ghost jobs vary, from wanting to look like you are growing and successful, making employees feel like they will have extra help soon, to making employees feel like they are easily replaced to ensure that they don’t get too big for their britches. All of these amount to fraud, both on the shareholder or investors who might be tricked, and to applicants who spend time and money applying to jobs that they could never get hired for.
Not only this, but it gives the impression that there are more jobs and vacancies than there actually are in the economy which is then used as a justification to fuel more migration.
I don’t entirely know how to deal with this one. Instinctively, I would like to have something like “you have 35 working days from the day you put up an advert to hire someone, otherwise ‘x’.” However, I don’t know what ‘x’ should be, and I also appreciate that sometimes you reach the end of a process and just find no one.
I’ve seen suggestions that all job adverts must be placed with the Job Center, but I feel like that is a bit of a nightmare. So this second point is free-floating I guess. What is the correct way of managing ghost jobs?
