Who guards the people

Listening to the business plan, which the owner of Sports Direct, Mike Ashley outlined to one of the Select Committees, one is struck by the desperate need for a method of better protection for "worker rights" in the UK. Of course the word "rights" is a tricky description since we see people claiming rights where one might think there should be none and the claim is preposterous.

Worker rights are not the sociological dream of people who feel that, in areas of human interaction, minorities in particular need protection. Worker rights are not a minority subject they effect us all in one way or another. They were won over decades of struggle and one only has to go back to the practices of 1930, of workers turning up at the gates of the shipyard or factory to learn if there was work for the day to realise how important respect for ones fellow man and woman is, especially if you employ them.
Mike Ashley along with others, operates his business on the 1930 precept that my profitability can be increased if I do not acknowledge that any of my workers (other than the managerial staff) have any but the most tenuous link with the company. 80% of his workforce are on a  "no guarantee hours contract" which means, as Mike Ashley wakes up in the morning and sees the sun shining he boosts his employment take on for the day and if it's raining and customers are more prone to staying away, he takes on less. His workforce are dictated by the contract to stand by and await his call, they can not fulfil other work opportunity or obligations, they are tied, on no pay to make themselves available.
I did a blog yesterday on Philip Greens role in bringing BHS down. His movement of money, his drawing of large dividends when the business needed the cash his disregard for the people who worked for him. The UK like any capitalist country is governed by people who wish to extract the maximum from the workforce with a minimal obligation. People who grow rich and powerful do so usually at least in part on the back of others. It's a natural law of commerce that for every winner there has to be a loser and this is where society and its governance comes to the rescue to ensure that the loser is not impoverished.

One of the major questions which has to be asked is, would our Parliament better protect the works and their rights than a "Union" of nations who drawn from a combination of backgrounds which not only define each nation but a cumulatively make the singular stronger. The regulations which emanate from the EU and the legal requirements which are binding on our Parliament also protect us. The question of whether our own blend of slow burn, hard won democracy won by the establishment giving ground slowly, under protest is more likely to advance our cause. 

Like our common law legal system it is based on the accumulation of previous judgements which then become an evolution of legal precedent. There is no written constitutions,  no set of constitutional rights on which to formulate the precedent only the slow acknowledgement of giving way when push comes to shove.

Would we were ruled by a more benign system but we are not and I wonder if the European Union isn't a better judge of what a citizen needs and should expect, than an Etonian elitist clique.