Insurance: Peaky Blinders Style
The Peaky Blinders are back, bright eyed and bloody nosed, as are the conditions that enabled their rise to power.
Thomas Shelby gangster and now sitting MP in the House of Commons. Despite dabbling with fascism the driving ideal behind his popularity is simple: when support for a disenfranchised and PTSD ridden community drops to nil, help will be taken where it is offered.
In 1926 the First General Strike took place, with over two million coal miners, steel workers and railway workers downing tools. Nearly a century later and the government may not have learnt its lesson. The mines and factories of the North may have closed but a new, chronically under-represented group of workers in the UK who require standardised legal and social protections has emerged — the 5.5 million self employed and freelance workers. This isn’t going to change soon: Upwork’s annual freelancing survey suggests 51% of freelancers couldn’t be swayed back to traditional employment, for any amount of money. This leaves a vacuum of financial protection which needs to be filled.
The Shelbys are an attractive bunch from the baby blue eyes to the perfectly pressed suits, but when broken down to their bare bones they are revealed as a creature of necessity. To the communities in Small Heath to Solihull they are the only ones offering a way of making enough to protect your family without slaving in a factory where working conditions are so bad that the Blinders are the safe option.
The 2019 edition of this issue for millions of workers is the rapidly expanding and scantly protected gig economy. Underpaying workers is nothing new, and the pace of governments globally to provide more than glacially slow and fragmented protections is worrying, and leaves private companies the only ones available to step in. We are, as a country, still operating under insurance practices designed for the first factory workers that even the Shelbys would have thought were old-school. Old style insurance companies view self-employment and freelancing as too insecure to be worthy of the same protections as salaried people and some of the gig-economy tycoons may be too concerned about their margins to protect those who underpin their business.
Globally lawmakers are beginning to take note, with courts in Madrid and AB5 in California defining gig-economy workers as employees rather than contractors, an important definition when you make minimum wage and still bear the brunt of a sick day.
So what options are the self-employed in the UK left with?
Just as a single coal miner or steel worker had little power when it came to bargaining with their employer in the 20s, most self-employed people have little buying power when faced with insurance giants. Terms and conditions full of jargon, prices scaled up for individuals and let’s be honest — policies so complicated you need several degrees and a code-breaker handy just to work out how long it runs for. So we got our lawyer and in-house cryptographer to use the promise of collective buying power to forge cover for the self-employed that doesn’t break the bank.
The final episode of Peaky Blinders will air on 22nd September, we here at COLLECTIVE will be watching. These days, instead of visiting the Shelbys why not visit us at jointhecollective.co.uk — we’ll make you an offer you won’t refuse (but obviously can).
