On May Day, founders are workers too

Tomorrow is May Day, and somewhere in the middle of the country, a married couple in their early forties is opening up a small bakery for the third Friday in succession on which they have not, between them, drawn a salary.

They started the business in 2022. They re-mortgaged the house. They missed two of their daughter’s school plays last term, including the one where she had a line. They have not, for nineteen months, taken a day off. They are, on the official ONS labour-market classification, “self-employed”, which is to say they are not, technically, considered workers at all.

I would like, on this particular May Day, to suggest that they are.

There is a particular sleight-of-hand in British political language that has, over the last fifty years or so, produced an increasingly narrow definition of the word “worker”. A worker, in current usage, is someone who is paid by an employer in return for doing a job, ideally with a contract, a payslip, and a pension contribution. The “workers’ movement”, in modern parlance, is the political and industrial movement representing exactly that figure. Anyone outside the definition is, by implication, something else, an entrepreneur, an investor, a self-employed person, a small-business owner, a family-firm founder. They get other ministries, other sympathies, other adjectives. They do not, on the whole, get celebrated on May Day.

This is, frankly, ridiculous. The bakery couple work, on the broad numbers, more hours than any of their employees. They take home, on average, less per hour than their employees. They have less holiday, less protection, less pension, less sick pay, less of everything. Their economic risk is total. Their political clout is somewhere between negligible and non-existent. Their public image, in much of British political discourse, is closer to that of the tax-avoiding non-dom than that of the sympathetic NHS porter, which is, when you actually meet either, a perfect inversion of reality.