Australian unions see flying ‘gig’ pigs landing from the UK

Both the Uber decision and the new UK tax laws have no jurisdiction over the contracting party or the independent contractor if either reside outside of the UK. The pressure is on for UK businesses to move as much of their flexible, commercial, contractor dependent business activities out of the UK. We expect to see a surge of this over the next 18 months.

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, the UK re-built its jobs numbers substantially on the back of a surge in self-employment reaching around 4.8 million in 2017. Now, following the Covid and tax mistreatments and the new illogic around self-employment legal status, we can expect this UK jobs and economic growth trend to collapse.

Fortunately, in Australia since around 2006, we've developed policies to support and 'protect' self-employed people and treat them with respect. This has included the same access as employees to the federal parental leave scheme (2010), JobKeeper and JobSeeker (2020) and the introduction of unfair contract laws (2016) and their planned 'beefing up this year. Also, this year the full pay-on-time laws for small business should pass.

This is what should occur. We don't 'protect' people by destroying their small business. We don't 'protect' people by stopping larger businesses doing business with small businesses. That's what's happened in the UK and California and what's planned for across the USA.

We 'protect' small business people by giving them access to a practical commercial 'rule of law' environment, backed by sensible access to social security support where needed. This creates a stronger economy with small business at its core. Let's hope that the UK small business destruction disease doesn't spread to Australia.