Albeit, in that piece she's not an Amazon employee but engaged by Amazon through an agency, and notably doesn't get the same T&Cs as permanent staff.

This argument can be applied for Unions and workers too. Regulation is necessary for all walks of life but over regulation is as bad as under regulation. The EU is an example where over regulation has restricted its development and led to it being uncompetitive.



The banking crisis was not caused by under regulation. But it was certainly assisted by regulators who were not up to the job. In the UK we contrived to create the climate for disaster when Buster Brown (of no more boom and bust notoriety) moved from one regulator to three regulators. "Oh I thought you at the BofE were checking that"....."And I thought you at the FSA had a handle of that...oops!"

The term "Free Market" is misused. I doubt if anyone would want a totally free market with no rules & regulations whatsoever.

Most businesses would argue for a "Free Trade" market where there were no import/export duties and simple, clear and fair regulations that apply market wide and that could be easily enforced, otherwise there will never be a level playing field. This can be achieved within your own borders but is unlikley to gain agreement on a world wide basis.

However Governments and civil servants do not understand business and therefore they are not the best people to make these regulations on their own.

Capitalism is far from perfect but so far all the alernatives have failed. Profit and the private sector should be encouraged and we need a smaller state to reduce the burdon.

Greed is not a product of capitalism - it is a human condition. There will always be greedy businessmen, greedy shareholders (including the pension funds etc), greedy unions and greedy workers.

That said much could be done to target a fairer society. I would like to see the shareholder rules change for public companies so that the employees own a substantial percent of the shares - say 40%. This would curtail some of the greed of the top executives, reward the employees by incentive and prevent unwanted take overs (if say a 75% shareholder vote was required)

This is the classic phrase of businesses that want to lobby for special protections/subsidies/advantages from government.

Let me guess, government doesn't understand business so they need that business to provide advice on how to do it!

Personally I don't think the RFL understands rugby league and I would much rather they asked Simon Moran from Warrington what the rules should be, as at least he's a rugby man and you could be sure that the correct decisions on administering the game would be made.

Isn't that why Adrian Beecroft paid a few thousand to the Conservative Party to let him make up some bonkers suggestions for how to make more people depend on legalised loan sharks?

Yes, the politicising of policy making is a dangerous route to go down and I'm always suspicious of anyone that throws out the blanket statement "government doesn't understand business". Essentially government is trying to regulate the markets fairly and in an impartial manner and you always find that representatives of a particular sector are particularly keen to get involved in drawing up the regulations to suit them.

I suppose the more apt rugby analogy would be the one of coaches that constantly criticise the referees for not knowing what they are doing, and suggesting that they themselves referee the next match involving their team.

It is amusing to see the type of stuff businesses come out with when they engage with government. I remember once being in a meeting with some representatives of businesses in a sector that was receiving very large government funds and the purpose of the meeting I was in was to establish the right auditing and monitoring information in order to track how these government funds were being used and to be able to measure afterwards the outcomes of the firms that had been helped so that the government could commission an independent report to check whether the investment had been value for money. The whole attitude of the business representatives was aggressive and hostile - continually hectoring the government officials that government "simply didn't get it"....the businesses were "not interested in gathering information for a government box ticking exercise"...this was "about getting the money out of the door to the businesses to stimulate the economy". What this was effectively code for was, they did not want to have to audit and account for the government money they were receiving and they certainly didn't want anybody later evaluating on what it had been used for. Their whole agenda was getting the money signed over from government as soon as possible and then "government getting out of the way so they could get on with it". In the end they didn't get away with it because a fairly senior government official brought up the fact that they were going to be in receipt of a very large sum of funding and if they weren't prepared to properly report and monitor on it to allow value for money to be evaluated on behalf of the taxpayer, then the money wouldn't be forthcoming: at this point they reluctantly came on side.

But I did think it was illustrative of the hectoring attitude some parts of the business community have to government - they are happy to take huge sums of money from the taxpayer but then at the same time lecture government that they don't know what they are doing so the best thing is just hand over the money and leave it to them and it will magically be used best!

Amazon and it is not just about exploiting staff that resulting super-normal profits needs to be looked at. If they are in the tax avoidance bracket they are diddling you and me.



Only for the "best" jobs. Neither Apple nor Google are accredited living wage employers in the UK.



Why is this "needless bureaucracy"? PAYE which collects N.I. does not seem particularly onerous and N.I. isn't simply something that is re-distributed to those in work is it!

Marxisim/Socialism/Communism = NO

Who accredits the living wage? I doubt very much there is anyone working directly for those two companies who earns less than the living wage. They want the best talent - that doesn't come cheap.

How many people do you think are employed in re-distributing these funds? According to the prominent group of posters on here the government is subsidising big business through income support and other benefits - though no one has produced any actual fact to prove it. That would suggest that all the employers NI and corporation tax they pay isn't sufficient to cover the benefits paid to those in work never mind those out of work.

One of the points of the piece is that it is not just about her.

If you are interested you can Google it and you will find out. Notable proponents of it are Boris Johnson and KPMG. It is not something you will be able to dismiss as some sort of meaningless figure.



I doubt very much you are correct. Not everyone employed in these companies is involved in the technology side of it in the same way not everyone employed by KPMG is an accountant.



Don't be stupid. The fact people in work receive benefits which they qualify for due to low income is all the proof you need.



No it doesn't. Where did you dream up that bit of ridiculous nonsense?

Over 80% (88%, IIRC) of housing benefit is paid to people who are in work.

So, either wages are too low or rents are too high or a combination thereof.




[url=http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/tenancies/majority-of-new-housing-benefit-claimants-in-work/6521183.articleIncrease in percentage of benefit claimants in work – 2012 report[/url

80%/88% or 17%?

Still too many, even if that lower figure is correct.

Are you happy with subsidising people who are working but cannot afford to live because pay is too low and/or the cost of housing insanely high?

Do you think foodbanks are a wonderful thing and that it's jolly nice of the Red Cross to hand out food parcels in the UK?

Do you consider this the only version of capitalism available or are there alternatives – or alternatives to capitalism altogether – that you think might work better for the majority?

TBH, one of the things that staggers me about the UK at present is the number of people who are apparently entirely happy to see their fellow citizens struggling – indeed, will blame them themselves for that – and perfectly ready to make excuses for anything that corporates and financial institutions do.

One wonders what the philosophical/ethical basis of that is.

So at the moment we have a regulated capitalist economy with gov commerical intervention in some areas by means of both subsidies (housing benefit, subs to franchises) and charges (a wide variety of taxes which charge different amounts depending on what they're for and where). With some variation in the levels of regulation and commercial intervention, this is pretty much the world wide model. Despite some short term ups and downs does seem to be delivering growth in living standards over the long term. Have we come up with a significantly different alternative through this, or just suggested minor tuning to the levels of regulation?

Personally, I don't have a revolutionary answer. I'd like to see a little less of gov. Certainly less central gov and more devolution to local gov. I see problems getting the right level of personnel in both areas, especially local gov though. The big problem I see with our govs is they are so tied into ideology and positioning against their opposition that they're backed into a position of having to follow an ideology regardless of whether it's the right thing or not.

"Tuning" would imply a system that was on the whole delivering an equitable and sustainable result. I think we have been moving further and further away from that for the best part of 30 years and it is only now we see the results of things like deregulation and yet our current government is challenging the EU to go even further down the same path.



I think you are right on the ideology front and it is bizarre to my mind that when it is plain sticking to the neoliberal mantra can be shown to be failing it is still slavishly stuck to. I think this is why some people think there is a grand conspiracy organised by a plutocracy.

An example of the stupidity of it all is what is happening in my area with the council. Local government provision of services such as payroll, legal services IT support and so on that things like schools would draw on are being turned into private companies or contracted to private companies to run. So the entire legal department is being turned into a private legal practice that will then bid for work from the council itself and schools etc. Same with IT support.

Now this is monumentally stupid because that implies there are people in places such at as schools who have the time and the skill to judge competing bids for the work. What is more some idiot of a government minister will probably make it compulsory in some way that schools have a duty to get best value as if this is a simple matter to judge.

This is taking small government to extremes and to the detriment of everyone except those who stand to profit from this, no doubt those running these new companies. It won't save the council tax payers a penny IMO. probably cost us more in the long run.

I'm not going to go get a bunch of graphs, but it certainly feels like both UK and world wide affluence has grown since 1984. The point I was making wasn't whether we had grown, which can of course be disputed but that we don't seem to have any realistic alternatives other than minor tuning to levels of regulation and commercial intervention. The model of private enterprise providing most needs and wants with gov filling in seems to be the world wide model now with only differences around how much enterprise and how much state.



and you know it will probably get to a point where it's working well this way and then we'll have another party come in, reverse all the changes, get that to the point it's working well before it gets changed again



Without wandering too far off topic I used to have local gov and local education in my sales patch for IT support. Our area was datacentre, not end user. I know we were better quality and more efficient at that than any council or uni would be doing it themselves.
Not so with laptops and end users which requires a more local level contact and on-site personnel, we got out of that business. However there are companies that are very good at that and can use expertese and skill earned by doing the same elsewhere to do it better.
I've also seen the likes of Northgate help both private and gov enterprises with payroll and personnel systems.

The point is it won't work well this way and this is based on experience so far. It is costing my wife's school more to pay for services once organised centrally.



I am sure but there are numerous tales of private IT companies making an absolute disaster of various projects for government and other public bodies to suggest they are not any better a bet than any other alternative.

Private companies are good at selling commodities where we are happy for some of them to fail but all what is happening here is we will end up with as fragmented purchasing regime where schools and others buy services from different providers and the overhead of doing this will end up costing us more.

My wife works in a nursery school which has less than a dozen computers and so will have little clout in obtaining the economy of scale the council currently can when purchasing laptops and software for example.

There is also the possibility that any these private companies could actually go bust leaving them high and dry which could be a serious issue given the fact some of the stuff that has to be done is time critical (budgets mostly) and some comes with legal requirements about what and when is recorded.

A council IT department won't go bust and can plan for such situations far better than a school with two admin staff, two teachers (one the head) and a few teaching assistants.

Having all support services bought in from outside requires someone [iin each school [/i to do the negotiating and the buying and I think expecting this model to be cheaper and any more efficient than a centrally planned council wide purchasing policy is going to be expecting too much.

That sounds a bizarre structure, to break down to such small units.

I didn't do anything with that level of education but saw things happening differently in healthcare. I'm not in the health care sector these days (I was for the latter half of 2012 and put all my efforts into the corporations supporting healthcare providers, the likes of Cerner, McKesson, BUPA, etc) so I'm not entirely up to date on their structure. What I understand of it is though: Surgeries are encouraged to run like standalone businesses, but that are also encouraged to for consortia to work together for projects that benefit from economies of scale such as IT infrastructure and out of hours coverage. That consortium can be hundreds of surgeries.

What's interesting for me in that space is the way such consortia or unis or hospitals can become skilled and specialists in particular areas, and use that to earn revenue. That means for the likes of me I have more than just ways to save costs - we can help them build capabilities they can sell on to their peers. i.e. one hospital was working on an imaging system that they planned to sell the use on onwards to other hospitals. One of the resellers I work with now is putting together a data storage solution for a uni who plan to sell usage of that storage facility to other unis as cloud storage, saving those unis costs compared to having and managing their own storage, but generating revenue and profit for the uni we're working with.

And how much do you think the council currently pays for it's laptops and software? An ex missus of mine is a "Public Sector Alliances Manager" for a software company. Basically, instead of my local council (Capita sponsored) simply going to PC World and buying a few dozen copies of Windows, due to some insane licensing agreement they have to buy it through a third party, who obviously shove a whopping surcharge on.

My own employer is the same, and it's a huge international company, every month or so we have the new hire car supplier, flight arranger etc etc. Even the tea bags, sugar and milk go through this process. The bloke who delivers the milk from his battered old pick up has to invoice, which then gets sent to Germany for approval, he then gets paid. The place that supplies the biscuits (Family Circle) charge £10 or £11 per box, the exact same box in Sainsbury's, £2.50! And don't get me started on how much it costs to lease, LEASE, a printer.

What a behemoth like a council or the NHS wants is a supplier who can pretty much guarantee supply, so they'll pay a premium for that. Your wife's school should get down to PC World/wherever and buy the dozen computers like any ordinary Joe, without the hassle of having to go through "procurement".

I've got similar crazy stories from the hotel group my wife works for, they are a Scottish company with all of their hotels in Scotland except one, which is in Leeds, which lets be honest is not a city that is short of all sorts of suppliers to the hotel industry, but every day a truck is sent down from Scotland to deliver clean linen and collect the used stuff, at least an eight hour trip that cannot be cheaper than sourcing it locally



I think businesses always look for the cheapest and quickest way to source supplies while they are under the control of board members who are "grounded", that is they live locally, have a connection to the area, to the county - as soon as they become part of a Group from outside the area or outside the country then common sense goes out of the window and the "corporate" workers take over, usually the ones for whom you'd be hard pushed to define what role they play other than turning up and drawing a salary.