this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Tesco has lost a high-profile “fire and rehire” case in the UK’s supreme court over proposals by the supermarket to let some staff go and re-employ them on lower pay.

The dispute with the shopworkers’ union Usdawbegan in 2021 and centred on moves to use firings or the threat of dismissal to remove retention payments awarded years earlier to some workers at distribution centres.

The UK’s highest court ruled that Tesco Stores Ltd could not terminate the employment contracts of staff to stop them receiving the retention payments and then rehire them on new contracts without the top-up.

The case has been closely watched because it raises wider questions about the practice of “fire and rehire” and an employer’s right to terminate a contract by giving notice to the employee and then re-employing them on less generous terms.

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 month ago (4 children)

How does anyone have faith in capitalism when stuff like this happens?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

They don't. But you can pay rent on revolutionary ideas alone.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Seriously, this isn't even something I would stoop to to min/max my earnings in Roller Coaster Tycoon 2. Executives who come up with shit like this should never be legally allowed in a C-suite position again.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago

They should be moved from the C-suite to the C block.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Either:

  • They're in denial that this happens (arguably, it didn't happen, as eventually Tesco lost, and they wouldn't know about it in the three years Tesco was winning because The Telegraph/Mail etc. wouldn't report on that).
  • They think worse things would always happen under other systems (e.g. everyone would be a slave of the state and go to gulag if they complained about anything).
  • They don't see it as an inherent problem with capitalism (e.g. simply make doing this illegal, and refuse to let business lobby to reverse the decision, and everything's fine).
  • They think this is a good thing (e.g. the fired workers will be incentivised to work harder, then earn a payrise, and use the extra 10p an hour to start a competing multibillion pound supermarket chain).
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Or they see this court success as a good thing and that a market will always need careful guidelines to prevent a company from being able to make insanely greedy decisions.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Or they don't believe this is what a capitalist system is. That one really gets me because I don't know where to start on defining capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They also argue that the business would go bust or move out of the country, both resulting in far wider job losses. I don't doubt that a small minority of businesses might fit into this but a business the size of Tesco that made a couple of billion of profit last year and is heavily dependent on physical sales in the UK to achieve that.

Same argument is used against the likes of Amazon or Apple paying fair taxes or wages, they do about 30 billion and 1.5 billion of sales of mostly physical goods here respectively, that they would have to give up on, which is just not going to happen. Apple has about half the UK mobile market, like they would give that up.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is what I always say when arguing about this at work, that if a company is making X billion in profit and we decide to tax them heavier so they only make half of X billion in profit they’re not going to leave as that’s still at lot of profit.

Sure there is an argument that it could set a precedent in other countries to tax harder but still some profit is better than no profit and if not then you don’t have a viable business anymore and someone else will capitalise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Capitalist hate competition once they got market share...

The fact that they are able to corner us with help of state actors is an abomination and yet bootlickers love it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I sometimes think the only people who hate capitalism more than leftists are "successful capitalists". It would help explain why they've always trended towards fascism since before the term was even coined.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

"suffering from success"