Politics: Corbyn Rubbishes Glasto’s Zero-Hour Contracts

The normal publicity game for politicians is to turn up and have your say, pose for photographs and then bugger off to your next assignment. That worked fabulously for Jeremy Corbyn at the Glastonbury festival this year but he has since been warned that the fine principles he espoused on stage were being flouted by the festival organisers.

The 700 litter pickers who clean up the Glastonbury site expected to receive two weeks’ work but three-quarters of them were sent home early because this year’s job was smaller than expected. “Workers had travelled to Somerset from countries including Czech Republic, Spain, Poland and Latvia after being handed zero-hours contracts to help with the large-scale clean-up operation on Worthy Farm,” according to The Independent.

That was soon after Corbyn won rapturous applause at the festival for saying that young people should not have to accept low wages, repeating his pledge in Labour’s 2017 election manifesto to ban zero-hours contracts.

The Deal

The BBC obtained a statement from the festival organisers saying “we would like to state that Glastonbury festival’s post-event litter picking team are all given temporary worker agreements for the duration of the clean-up. The length of the clean-up varies considerably from year to year based largely upon the weather conditions before, during and after the festival.

This is something the litter pickers – many of whom return year after year – are made aware of in their worker agreements which assure them of a minimum of eight hours’ work.”

The organisers said that this year was much drier than expected and visitors took more things home so the work took just two and a half days rather than the 10 days needed last year. Those workers who couldn’t leave after being turned away were given free meals and transport to travel connections in local towns.

Simon Kladlcak from the Czech Republic said there was no clear line of communication between the festival and the workforce. “The organisers have to have known that there was not enough work for that amount of people. No one spoke to us before. There were these rumours and people are quite nervous about it. No one let us know until yesterday afternoon.

They just put up a list of the 100 people who were able to keep working,” he said.

The festival no doubt honoured its commitment to a minimum of eight hours’ work and provided benefits such as free meals but the lack of communication lacked any respect for basic rights beyond those guaranteed in a written contract. Few if any workers would have travelled so far for such a small return, so a much longer contract was surely an unwritten offer to attract these low-paid workers.

Corbyn’s response

A spokesman for Corbyn said that “how Glastonbury runs its event and runs its finances is entirely a matter for them. But these contracts should not be in place and shouldn’t be used.

We oppose them and next time we are in government we will ban them. Jeremy and the Labour Party have taken a very strong stand against the use of zero-hours contracts and the exploitation of migrant and other workers and we would take that view wherever it happened.”

Having won headlines pulling pints and enjoying maximum exposure at Glastonbury Corbyn insisted that he did not support the way the festival organisers had treated their workers. Perhaps the proof will come next year, when he could demand better behaviour from the organisers or even get off the stage and join the litter pickers to see if their treatment has improved.

by Stewart Vickers

 

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