Arron Banks’ Brexiteering blog, and official media partner of Leave.EU, Westmonster, boasted today that “BREXIT BRITAIN SEES BIGGEST SURGE IN SALARIES FOR 20 MONTHS”, claiming that “British workers already seeing some benefit from UK’s EU exit vote.” But, as ever, all is not what it seems.
Westmonster hailed figures from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), which “show the starting salary for permanent workers is increasing.” Westmonster went on to say:
“This is great news for British workers who, for too long, have seen their wages dragged down by an over-competitive market fuelled my mass economic migration.”
What Westmonster seems to have overlooked is that, according to Channel 4 Factchecker (using figures from the National Office of Statistics) zero-hours contracts are now at an historic high, and Brexit is exacerbating the crisis.
— TradesUnionCongress (@The_TUC) August 8, 2017
“If you’re on a zero-hours contract you have no guarantee of work from one day to another. Put a foot wrong and you can be let go in a heartbeat. Turn down a shift because your kid’s sick and you can be left with little or no work…Median pay for a zero-hours worker is a third less an hour than for an average employee.”
Westmonster concluded, perversely, that “Brexit promised to put more money into British workers’ pockets and it’s delivering.” Pull the other one, Arron.
Brexit Britain’s dependence on zero-hours lines corporate pockets, not workers