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Comment by Urahandystar | Hacker News Reader

The main reason for this was employers could cut your hours if they had a poor month and needed to balance the books. Which is understandable for smaller businesses. Then the bigger companies went nuts with it and ended up massively changing the dynamics of work.

This change should go further in killing off the zombie companies that exist which means another spike in the unemployment rates. Coupled with the figures on the UK topping AI replacement of workers charts things are looking really grim.

The UK desperately needs a functioning angel and VC culture to absorb this but it looks like the cart has bolted before the horse.

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>The UK desperately needs a functioning angel and VC culture

That is like the last thing they need. Functioning unions and collective bargining is the proven way to combat this.

From far away it sounds like they need both. Stronger businesses that make more money, and stronger unions to ensure the money is shared.

The average VC business is not very strong. They rely on power laws.

The ones that pan out create an ecosystem of related businesses, suppliers, and customers. They create millionaires and billionaires who go on to start their own companies. Strong businesses are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for strong unions.

Zero-hours contracts probably started as a pragmatic tool for genuinely small, volatile businesses, but they scaled into something very different when large employers adopted them systematically

> functioning angel and VC culture

This is an extraction model where the rich use capital to extract more capital from the aspiring poor. That should be banned.

The "angels" (what a narcissist term anyway!) should be taxed on excess capital, so they don't engage in king making and gambling.

An aspiring poor is better than a poor thats given up hope. The VC model only extracts capital if the potential is reached. If not then the business is at least keeping people off benefits while they try. Heavy taxation and then increasing the civil service to absorb job losses just leads to a bloated stagnant economy.

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