Speeches by Poynton.

“But you do not compensate at all, ever?”

“How often, then, would you say that happens within your business?”

“You have 11,500 people in your workforce who week to week, month to month, might be seeing their shifts changed at 24 hours’ notice, and less than that perhaps. They have childcare in place but then they are not receiving a single penny from you on that.”

“Right, but some are?”

“Could you manage your family finances on that basis, then?”

“You could, though, couldn’t you? Because people do.”

“People do compensate. Mr Lillis has talked about some of the work that big businesses—large businesses like yourselves—do that come to an agreement with their employees. You have said that the zero-hours contracts employees are important to you.”

“You could do that. You choose not to.”

“Okay. What happens when you break that best practice? Do you compensate your workers if you change the notice of the shifts?”

“Mr Brown, just to go back a little bit on one of your answers there, you skated a little bit over the notice periods. You talked about four weeks, two weeks and one week. I want to nail it down. Four weeks you would start doing your shift roster.”

“Two weeks you then give staff notice and then one week sometimes as well?”

“I suppose that more broadly that model, as you say, does not work for you, so I would be interested in your views. Do you think we need clearer regulation around the gig economy given the experience that you have had?”

“I will just read a little bit from your statement. “Uniqlo no longer sources freelance workers for temporary store-based roles. We instead recruit for our temporary and permanent positions directly or through other channels to ensure all our staff are eligible for applicable employment benefits. We are committed to tre…”

“You stopped it. What went wrong?”

“You had the trial. It was a three-week trial.”

“So if I have it right, the pay was the same but the other elements that we talk about—the full plethora of benefits—they did not get those. They got the pay, but they did not get everything else.”

“What were the pay and conditions for those freelance workers? How do they compare to the permanent staff you talked about?”

“You could not get enough people through agencies so you tried freelance?”

“That does not answer the question because the question was why freelance over agency. We understand that you need to manage busy Christmas peaks. There are staff shortages in certain parts of the country. But why freelance over agency?”

“Mr Dudech, what motivated Uniqlo to hire freelancers over agency workers to manage your Christmas period?”