FLEXIBLE THINKING
If Angela Rayner has been “pushy” in toughening Labour’s stance on workers’ rights, then as she explains to Tom Clark, that’s because of her first-hand experience in juggling parenthood and unpredictable shifts
For Angela Rayner, insecure work is personal. Long before she rose to be Labour’s deputy leader, she was working in care: “I started off on a zero-hours contract,” she recalls of the nineties but, “at the time, there was a different phrase: they called us casual workers.”
The prevalence may have risen, and the parlance has changed, but the brutal basic practice has not. The vague terms from her employers were: “you work for us some time between 7am and 10pm, over seven days, flexible… we didn’t know from one week to the next what our hours are going to be. I remember quite vividly it being very, very difficult, especially because I had a young son.” Work was at once inflexible with response to family demands, and insecure with regard to what money was coming in, and times were hard.