We’ll start with the good news – Reform UK appears to be imploding. Nigel Farage has had a wildly public fallout with (now former) Reform MP Rupert Lowe, who was stripped of his whip and investigated by the police over alleged workplace bullying and “verbal threats” against the party chairman.

As Reform flounders, the Government is busy making itself even more unpopular – if that’s possible – by trailing a series of public sector cuts ahead of the Spring Budget. There are plans to cut half of the staff in NHS England and thousands of jobs in the civil service, not to mention impending benefit cuts.

Keir Starmer is expected to announce £5 billion of cuts to personal independence payments – commonly known as PIPs – the main disability benefit. Mikey Erhardt from Disability Rights UK speaks to Nish and Coco about the devastating impact this could have on 3.6 million claimants across the UK.

Next up, over the past few years we’ve seen waves of strikes by warehouse workers for the likes of Amazon, Tesco, Argos and others – but what exactly is it like to work in this algorithm-driven gig economy? Coco speaks to Laura Carreira, the director of a new film about the hidden lives of warehouse workers in the UK.

Finally, here’s something nobody wants to hear. King Charles has launched a personal playlist to mark this year’s Commonwealth Day. Nish and Coco strike back with their own playlist.

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PSUK Alternative King’s Playlist

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Guests

Mikey Erhardt

Laura Carreira

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TRANSCRIPT

[AD]

Nish Kumar Hi, this is Pod Save the UK, I’m Nish Kumar.

Coco Khan And I’m Coco Khan. Nish, I have to ask you, have you seen the King’s playlist?

Nish Kumar Unbelievably, I have not. What’s on there, Coldplay?

Coco Khan You know, some of it’s pretty good actually. Bob Marley’s on there, Beyonce’s got a track on there, some of it is a bit less cool, Michael Buble, and possibly everyone’s least favorite Kylie Minogue track.

Nish Kumar Well, Coco, you’re wrong there because there’s no such thing as a bad Kylie Minogue song. This is all low -hanging fruit so far. Where are the Sex Pistols? Where’s God Save the Queen? Where’s Anarchy in the UK?

Coco Khan There’s a level of self -awareness there, Nish, that I don’t mean to disappoint you, but it’s not something that we often get from our beloved royals. But speaking of anarchy and God, certainly the Messiah at least, today we’re going to be discussing the all -out civil war in Reform UK.

Nish Kumar And Keir Starmer says that our benefit system is the worst of all worlds, so they’re going to make it harder for people with disabilities to claim. We’ll be speaking with Mikey Earhart from Disability Rights UK. so let’s kick off with the first piece of good news i’ve heard so far this year reform is falling apart again i will not be singing it to the tune of love will tear us apart

Coco Khan Oh you know exactly what I was going to do!

Nish Kumar Regardless of how much people want me to do that. I don’t wish to associate that song with Nigel Farage in any way, shape or form.

Coco Khan You have to admit, it is fitting though.

Nish Kumar Well look, the producers have banned me from making any jokes about my erections in this segment, so let’s just say I am ragingly engaged with this story.

Coco Khan Nurse! Nurse! Nish is having a moment! I think the word you were looking for, by the way, is engorged.

Nish Kumar Just for clarity. I It’s 8 a .m. in Nashville, Coco. I don’t need to hear the word engorged at this time of the morning. So look, here’s the basics. Rupert Lowe, famously fanboyed by Elon Musk, is out of reform. Why? Well, the story from the reform side is that he bullied staff and made threats of violence against the party chair, Zia Youssef. The Met Police have now launched an investigation. Rupert Lowe denies any wrongdoing and says the allegations are untrue. The story from Mr. Lowe’s side is that he’s being pushed out because he dares to question the party’s messianic leader. The rancorous war of worlds has played out across social media over the last week and if it were possible has somehow managed to make them appear even less ready for any kind of serious role in government.

Coco Khan So as a quick reminder, Reform had five MPs, so with the loss of Rupert Lowe, they’ve lost a whopping 20 % of their MPs. That puts them on the same footing in the Commons as the Greens. Not that you’d be able to tell by the enormous amount of press they seem to receive. We’ve seen so, so, so much bluster about Reform from the right -wing press over the last few months. So what do you think, Nish? Is this going to finally shut up his cheerleaders in the right -wing press?

Nish Kumar No, I really don’t believe that it will. I mean, I think that reform is a sort of chaotic rabble, a kind of motley crew of opportunists, gold coin sales people, and racists. I mean, during the election campaign, activists for the party were filmed on camera using racial slurs about the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. There’s nothing about them that’s ready for any serious role in government and nothing about Nigel Farage’s political career. has ever suggested he has a real interest in playing any role in government. The thing about Farage is that he is a campaigner. He’s not actually a political leader, but that isn’t going to stop the right -wing press from cheerleading for him relentlessly. I don’t see this as denting Farage because I imagine it will lead to a slew of op -ed pieces in The Telegraph and The Mail and The Sun and The Times talking about how brilliant Farage is and how Rupert Lowe was the problem. Where it could create issue for them is. this kind of issue of will Elon Musk intervene in British politics because there was this idea that he was going to make this enormous reform donation. Then he said that Farage should step aside. His relationship seems to cleave closer to Rupert Lowe at the moment, so that’s where it could cause problems for the party, though it does seem like But Freyja’s bridges with Musk have already been burned.

Coco Khan I think it’s worth stating as well that the creative differences that these two are having is about whether complete actual far -right nutters should be allowed in the party. Tommy Robinson, for example, that’s what this creative difference is about. So it couldn’t be more grim, really. Also, the thing that kicked all of this off kind of is the right -wing press, so low complained to the Daily Mail that reform had remained a protest party led by the sire under Pharaoh, right? Lowe also claimed that he himself was barely six months into being an MP and in the betting to be the next Prime Minister, which seems a bit much, isn’t it? You’ve only been an MP for six months, do you think you’re going to be the next Prime Minister?

Nish Kumar Also everyone’s in the betting for everything. That’s not how betting works. I could technically say I’m in the betting for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Coco Khan I’ll send an email, Nish.

Nish Kumar Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Coco Khan Your odds are like several billion to one.

Nish Kumar Exactly. I’m in the betting to be the next James Bond. I’m putting it out there.

Coco Khan Okay

Nish Kumar I’ve put a bet on myself to be the next James Bond.

Coco Khan Oh no, we’re going to see this in the mail.

Nish Kumar I imagine it’s going to be pretty weird because Jeff Bezos has taken it over. And so I guess the next Bond film is just going to be James Bond beating up climate protesters and unionized Amazon workers. I imagine that’s what the next movie is going to be. James Bond Union Buster. And it’s going to feature, I imagine, quite an alarming sex scene with an Alexa. That’s what the next James Bond is going to be. So I’m not sure anyone really wants to be part of it, but I’m saying now of the same logic. that Rupert Lowe is in the betting to be the next Prime Minister, I am in the betting to be the next James Bond.

Coco Khan I have this theory about Rupert Lowe that, you know, he’s a boomer that’s online too much. You know, I’m sure some flag shaggers and bots have said, you should be the next Prime Minister. And they’ve tweeted that to him. But that doesn’t make it real. Just like it’s not real that like hot girls in your area are not looking to meet guys like you. You know what I mean? None of this is real. But nonetheless, as reform flounders, this week, the government is rolling the pitch for upcoming cuts in the spring budget. A couple of months ago, all sides were pointing to this being something of a non -event. There was even hints of it being skipped, but now it looks like we’re in for some trademark Labour Party doom and gloom. Are you ready, kids?

Nish Kumar So the big one, huge benefit cuts to the tune of six billion pounds. More on that with our guest, Mikey Earhart later. We’ve also heard plans from the health secretary to cut half. That’s right. Half of the staff of NHS England.

Coco Khan So we’d already expected the loss of around 2000 jobs, but the latest is that 6 ,500 jobs are set to go. So these are office -based jobs, not frontline medical staff. And alongside this announcement, there’s been an exodus of almost all of the staff at the top of the organization.

Nish Kumar And this is just the first step of the government’s plans to cut back on the number of civil servants in Whitehall, the bonfire of the bureaucrats as the Daily Mail is calling it. This week, cabinet office minister Pat McFadden will set out plans to disrupt the status quo to achieve an active and modern state. Now, without further clarification on what all of these cuts look like, it’s all starting to feel vaguely Trumpian, you know, in the absence of any actual specific information on. where these cuts are coming from, this general idea of a sort of bonfire of bureaucrats, it does feel a bit doge, that’s all I’m saying.

Coco Khan Part of the measures will mean that any civil servant performing below expectations may be incentivized to leave their jobs, with McFadden promising a new mutually agreed exits process. So it’s not quite a chainsaw, but it is a very hefty pair of garden shears. Performance related pay is also on the cards, alongside more digitalization of the civil service. Again, what is that phrase? Digitalization of the civil service? I mean, we all think computers are good and better than paper, I guess. But you know, what does that actually mean?

Nish Kumar Shadow Tory Home Secretary Chris Filt has said that the plans are weak and anemic compared to what they would have done, but even the very suggestion that these are in line with Tory plans suggests heavily that they’re not going to be facing any real meaningful opposition to these in parliament. And look, we should say that in a week where reform is kind of imploding and the Conservative Party, I mean, appears to have gone absent without leave. I don’t know if anybody’s heard from the Tories. Or if anyone has seen any of them, if you have seen a conservative MP recently, please phone in where possible because they do just seem to have sunk without a trace. And whilst that is obviously incredibly funny, it is also concerning that we don’t seem to have functional or meaningful opposition to the government from the largest party of opposition. Like that is a genuine concern.

Coco Khan The unions, of course, they’re speaking up against it, so the Civil Servants Union accused the government of delivering a sound bite, not a credible plan for change, and described it as a retreading of failed narratives. At the end of last year, Stammer was accused of using insulting and Trumpian language by the head of the FDA after he said that too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline. I mean, it’s kind of poetic, but wow, I mean, that doesn’t sound like a Labour Prime Minister to soon.

Nish Kumar Well, I mean, the whole country has been in a tepid bath of managed decline for about 15 years. Your energy bills are still increasing, your food shop is still increasing, the government is telling you that it’s set fire to a load of bureaucrats. It all feels a little bit like my roof is falling in and someone has said, you need to install a better burglar alarm. You’re dealing with completely irrelevant problems at the moment.

Coco Khan But now let’s look beyond our borders. So Canada has a new leader and it’s a name that you might be familiar with. It’s Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England. He’s just succeeded Justin Trudeau to become Prime Minister.

Nish Kumar It was quite strange. I was in Canada. I started this leg of the tour in Toronto. And at the time, Mark Carney was obviously being heavily touted as the next Prime Minister of Canada, the person who would lead the Liberal Party into the elections this year. Obviously, Mark Carney is Canadian. I knew that. And yet he was such a fixture on British news that when I arrived in Canada, I was like, what the hell is Mark Carney doing in Canadian news? Like, how has this happened? It was like seeing Joey Tribbiani turn up in an episode of Frasier. So odd. Carney’s presence has upset everyone’s favorite former British Prime Minister, of course. Liz Trust tweeted, yet another, in inverted commas, impartial British bureaucrat goes into left -wing politics. At the Bank of England, Carney backed ruinous net zero policies and money printing. The British state is completely rigged. It’s worth pointing out at this moment that Mark Carney was appointed by George Osborne, the ugh conservative.

Coco Khan That well-known leftist.

Nish Kumar Yeah, well-known leftist, George Osborne.

Coco Khan I mean, Carney becoming prime minister is probably good for the UK in terms of UK and Canadian relations. He backed Rachel Reeves for chancellor and he was instrumental in creating our new national wealth fund. I just find it funny like that this conspiracy that so many figures on the right have, including a former prime minister, that everyone that does an impartial job is secretly lefty. I wish babe. Oh, babe, how I wish, you know, the universities are full of lefties, not my university, you know what I mean? Like the BBC is full of lefties. Really? Are we sure about that? I think someone must try to run for your party. I just, it’s I think some of them have tried to – What a strange conspiracy that they have.

Nish Kumar Are these lefties in the room with you now Liz? Anyway, Carney is going to be an interesting foil to the US president because he’s already hit out against Trump for attempting to destroy the Canadian way of life and is standing firm as the tariff wars heat up. But as always for more on this you should tune in to Pod Save the World where Tommy and Ben discuss the growing trade wars, the hints of peace in the Ukraine and how Carney might fight shrub.

Coco Khan And also a quick reminder that we want your questions for our up and coming mailbag special. They can be stupid. They can be funny. But you can also ask us a serious political question too.

Nish Kumar As a sneak peek, we’ve had this response from Simon, who didn’t have a question, but more of a comment. He said, I can’t believe you ended your episode on feminism by calling it a mail bag. Hashtag cancelled.

Coco Khan What is he suggesting instead then?

Nish Kumar I guess a female bag?

Coco Khan Female bag? No, we can’t have a female bag, that’s, you know, a bag is a vessel, it’s just, it’s saying things that I don’t think we really want to be communicating. We could do it do it gender neutral. We could do it as a veil bag. Eh?

Nish Kumar I mean, listen, I don’t hate it.

Coco Khan I felt my most auntie there when I said it, I was like, oh God, this was like a glimpse into my future. Now, after the break, we’re speaking to disability rights campaigner, Mikey Earhart, about the government’s brutal ideas for reforming our welfare system. Pod Save the UK is brought to you by Sky Sports.

Nish Kumar [AD]

Coco Khan Britain’s benefit system is the worst of all worlds, well, that’s according to the Prime Minister speaking to Labour colleagues on Monday evening. Here’s the Prime Minister at PMQs on Wednesday.

Clip We inherited a system which is broken, it is indefensible economically and morally and we must and we will reform it. We will have clear principles Mr Speaker, we will protect those who need protecting, we will also support those who can work back to work but Labour is the party of work, we are also the party of equality and fairness.

Nish Kumar This strong rhetoric arrives ahead of heavily trailed cuts to the welfare budget, which ITV’s Anushka Asthana reports to be in the ballpark of £6 billion a year. £5 billion of that saving is to be made through cutting personal independence payments, commonly known as PIPs. PIPs are benefits not linked to work. They exist to help pay for the extra costs in life of having a disability. According to the DWP, there’s around 3 .6 million claimants across the UK.

Coco Khan Disability and poverty charities have urged the government to rethink its plans, writing in an open letter that without PIP, a further 700 ,000 disabled households could be pushed into poverty. So joining us now to understand how this is going to impact the lives of PIP claimants across the country is Mikey Erhardt from Disability Rights UK. Welcome to the pod

Mikey Erhardt Hi there. Thank you so much for having me.

Coco Khan So these feel like, I mean, brutal cuts. How would they affect the lives of people claiming?

Mikey Erhardt I mean, they’re going to be hugely challenging, I think. We don’t have a benefit system in this country that provides right now for most people. I think trying to find further savings, trying to find ways of reducing the amount of support people get, it’s just going to push people into further poverty. Those who are on that sort of cliff edge into deeper poverty and beyond that as well, I think it just further entrenches that divide that we have in this country between. disabled people, working class people who require state support in some way, and people who don’t, and this gap is going to continue to emerge.

Coco Khan PIP is not that much money. It’s not like a life -changing sum that people might think it is.

Mikey Erhardt It isn’t and the way that PIP is talked about and the way that I guess much of the media and ministers in their comms team like to talk about PIP is to put it into this big model of how the benefit system works and it’s important to split these things out right so there is universal credit and and sometimes things like employment and support allowance on one side these are your benefits that you get as a result of being unable to work or unemployed for some reason and the amount of money you get which is pretty inadequate right speaks to any poverty charity and they will tell you it’s not enough, but you get those very defined criteria and reasons and there’s lots of strict assessments for those. There’s a whole other ballpark of strict assessment for PIP, but PIP is there to accept in some ways that it costs more money to be disabled. Around about 12 grand a year to be disabled, to live the life of a non -disabled person, right? If you take sort of rough averages, that’s where the disability charity Scope put it. really hard to do like a ballpark average figure for what you get from pip but if you really draw it like down the middle you might get like seven thousand pounds a year from pip right if you’re right down the middle and some people get more some people get less but those two numbers right i’m not an economist those are not the same 12 is more than seven um your listeners might be pleased to hear uh good job if they did that at home but like it’s not adequate it’s not on a amount of money and to try and find savings. within that almost always means and as we’re sort of seeing trail that we might have the level of PIP frozen so it won’t go up with inflation that is just people losing money and we’re going to make it harder to qualify for PIP which is really quite devastating really quite depressing I think for a lot of people receiving that news at the moment because as we said right PIP is there it acknowledges that it costs more to be disabled because we’ve built a world a society where things cost more to be disabled. those costs aren’t suddenly going to change because suddenly you don’t qualify.

Nish Kumar So when Keir Starmer says that they’ll protect those that need protecting, what’s he talking about there? Because I understand the half of his rhetoric that’s associated with efficiencies, we understand how that’s going to manifest itself, freezing pit payments. What’s the other half of this equation?

Mikey Erhardt It’s a bit of an oxymoron, right? To say we’re gonna take money that we know you need for essentials away from you, but don’t worry, we somehow have your back. It’s pretty frustrating, it’s quite worrying. I think for a lot of disabled people across this country, this isn’t new, it feels a bit like deja vu, right? Like this is yet another prime minister seeing economic downturn or poor economic numbers and pulling at the lever that they seem to have at number 10 that is cut the benefits bill.

Coco Khan know, when you were talking earlier about the cost to be disabled is, you know, around £12 ,000. People that are disabled and working will be made poorer by these changes. So it doesn’t even serve their fucked up ideology, if that makes sense.

Mikey Erhardt It’s going to hurt disabled people across society, right? And not just disabled people, people with long -term health conditions. And some of this like rhetoric around an explosion of claimants is just not true, basically. Quite a lot comes down to us raising the pension age over and over again. And then, yes, surprise, surprises. People aren’t getting state pension. They’re around without support for longer. They’re getting older. They might require things like PIP. That explains a little bit of the growth there. It means we’ve ended up where we are now, where it’s easier, right? It’s easier to do, in some ways, the horrible thing of cutting benefits than it is to do a bit of, to use the government’s own language, hard work to roll up their sleeves. A bit ironic that they might be scared of doing something like that, but to test a different approach, build a different benefit system, do something that actually provides people tangible support day -to -day. That feels too difficult to do, and so we pull the same lever again and again.

Nish Kumar Is it possible to also make the argument that not only are we viewing disability through completely the wrong lens, we’re also even viewing the economics of these payments completely the wrong way around. Estimates from Pro Bono Economics suggest that for every pound of money spent on PIP and disability living allowance, claimants actually get around £1 .48 of wellbeing improvements. At a time where every pound you spend seems to be going less far than it ever did. This is actually. an example of something that is genuinely good value for money. Are we completely wrong headed, not just in our approach to disability, but also in our approach to the economics around this conversation?

Mikey Erhardt Oh, absolutely. Like the benefit system exists as a safety net for everyone, right? You can become disabled, you can become unemployed at any point in your life. Right? There’s almost one in five people that are disabled in this country. We’re a massively diverse group, loads of different backgrounds, lifestyles, impairment. Our lives are not defined by economic value. But if you want to go down that line of thinking, yeah, of course it’s about economic thinking. But what it comes down to is… it’s easier for the Treasury, for the DWP to look at this from a money in money out type perspective to do something on a spreadsheet that has really really negative impacts for people than be brave and look at it like you said through that different lens of understanding what the benefit system is there for. If you’re supported by an adequate benefit system you might be able to find better work in the future. You might become as the government wants everyone to be. more economically engaged, because you have that support system there, right? It’s so hard. I don’t think people understand how difficult it is to live on the benefit system and how difficult it is to live on the benefit system for a long period of time. You’re not going to do the things the government want you to do, which is, you know, get in a position to find work. We do have to ask the question of like, what work, where, where do these sort of jobs exist? government in particular seemed to think disabled people could just fall into and not doing enough of.

Coco Khan So we’ve spoken about how, you know, these cuts have a wrongheadedness in terms of the economy, but there’s also a wrongheadedness in terms of just political gaming, right? Like, is this clever for Labour? So the usually moderate trade union Congress secretary, Paul Novak, he’s warned that a major lesson from the Tory years is that austerity damage the nation’s health, we must not make the same mistake again. So, you know, trade unions themselves are speaking out against Labour. And then there’s dissent within Labour’s own ranks. So. Here’s Nadia Wittum speaking to Bbc Radio 4’s Today program.

Clip Look, I was on these benefits, my mum had to stop work when I was a teenager to care for me. I represent disabled people, all of us do, and we all hear their stories every day and just how scared they are about this and what a difference these payments make to their lives. I can’t, I can’t look. Icon I – My constituents in the eye, I can’t look my mum in the eye and support this.

Coco Khan Hearing that, are you hopeful the government might change its tax?

Mikey Erhardt We’ve got a long time to go with this, right? It’s a green paper that’s going to be coming out. And I think for listeners who don’t know, there’s just a process that well, green papers are the consultative stage. What this sort of week of media has shown is that people know this bill’s not going to make a difference to the long -standing issues across society. The effects are pretty obvious. People are going to get sicker. We’re going to undermine people’s rights to a decent quality of life. And we’re going to continue to entrench. by us to access and employment and social inclusion that we always disabled people have a right to. And I think most politicians know that as well and it’s the time for them, you know, to be brave and to stand up in the way that we, you know, heard politicians stand up for their constituents in the last week. And we have to commend those who do that. It’s not always the easiest thing to do. But I think the other side as well is for disabled people across the country to remember that we represent a enormous group across society. There are millions of us. And whilst a bill like this is in its consultative stage, that’s the time where it’s often most important to, as an individual, do the things that sometimes feel not as meaningful, reaching out to your MP, going to constituency surgeries, responding to the consultation as an individual. And those are like things that you can tangibly do, that listeners can tangibly do, because this is the stage in which the government has to see that there is no social majority for this. And I think they know that. but they’re gonna apparently keep plowing ahead anyway and they need to know that that’s not something that they can get away with.

Coco Khan Like you were saying, lots of people haven’t interacted with the benefit system for people who have, I think we all know that like, it’s like getting blood from a stone. And like you say, if you do get some blood, you can barely live off it. And that’s putting aside all the like, way that it hinders you from actually getting better and just the indignation of it all. Do you think it would be worthwhile in the kind of public consciousness of separating out disability and say for example universal credit right because i think in the mind they just see everyone. as being, and I quote, on benefits and they have this bogeyman of being on benefits. Would it be helpful to disabled people for there to be a separation or is actually the fact that they are sort of rolled up together makes sense because there is a relationship between poverty and poor working conditions and bad health? I genuinely don’t know. What do you think?

Mikey Erhardt It’s an interesting question. I think the two ways I’d approach that is the first thing to sort of understand is that no one’s worth is defined by your ability to work, right? There are lots of people who just won’t, no matter how we change the world of work, be able to work. And we’re not changing the world of work fast enough, right, like some of this hinges on the idea that the, you know, the employment rights bill is gonna completely change Britain’s working conditions. And even if you take that at face value, it’s not happening anytime soon. But I think the other elements won’t pick. You know, you chat to any government minister at the moment, and you’d think the whole point of our social security system, our benefit system is to get people into work. But it’s not. It’s meant to be a safety net that supports you when you need it. And I think that’s the separation that we need. It’s not a funnel for you to get into work. It’s a safety net. Like I think the last thing I’d like to say is that you cannot take what is happening in the benefit system, what’s happening this week and will probably happen over the next like months with this bill. away from how poor our public services are and how little they support disabled people, right? We aren’t going to get change on social care until potentially the end of this parliament, right? We’re getting a review on something that is fundamental for lots of disabled people to live an independent life until the end of 2030 maybe, we might get some recommendations for change and you’re gonna cut people’s benefits in the meantime, right? People who barely get support where they need it and you’re gonna say, do you know what? your lives are not that important at the moment, because you’re not economically active enough. And I think that it’s just, yeah, it’s a very depressing state of affairs. And like I said, it’s time for disabled people and people who support us to do everything we can really.

Nish Kumar That’s a great place to leave it. Mikey Erhardt, thank you so much for joining us today on Pod Save the UK.

Mikey Erhardt No, thank you.

Nish Kumar Now the plans for welfare are something that we’re going to be keeping an eye on as we head towards the spring budget in two weeks time, so stay tuned.

Coco Khan [AD]

Coco Khan In the era of click and collect, we rarely think about the hidden workers behind this easy convenience. The frictionless experience we have in retail is very rarely replicated by the producers behind it. The number of warehouse workers in the UK has more than tripled since 2010 to 284 ,000 people in 2023. And over the past few years, we’ve seen waves of strikes at Amazon, at Tesco, at Argos and others. So why are they striking? Well, as part of Labour’s employment rights bill inquiry, Joshua Reynolds Mp put exactly this question multiple times to Amazon representatives about recurring strikes at their warehouses in Coventry. Here was their response at the Business and Trade Select Committee in December last year.

Clip If you are that great a place to work, why have your workers in Coventry gone on strike so much?

Clip Our employees have the right to join a trade union or not to join a trade union and we totally respect that.

Clip I’m pulling teeth at this point, neither of you answer that question so far. I’ll ask it once more. I’ll ask it once more and then I’ll give up because I don’t think I’m going to get an answer Why have they gone on strike so much? What is the reason behind it? You talk to co -workers every day You’ve told us and that’s what your teams do. So when you ask them, why are you going on strike? What’s their answer back to you? Why are they striking?

Clip They were demonstrating their right to support the trade union that they were a member of. Simply put.

Coco Khan So while Amazon bosses repeatedly failed to give an answer there, Laura Carreira’s award -winning new fiction film, On Falling, draws on her personal experiences and interviews with warehouse workers around the country to give unique insight into the human cost of today’s algorithm -driven gig economy. She joins us now. Laura, welcome to Pod Save the UK.

Laura Carreira Hi, thank you for having me.

Coco Khan So first of all, congratulations on the film. It is excellent. For the listeners, please do go and see it. It follows a young Portuguese woman living in Scotland who works as a picker in a huge warehouse. She’s one of the many migrant workers who make up the workforce. So I guess my very first question is, what inspired you to make this film?

Laura Carreira I’ve been kind of interested at looking at our relationship to work, because I think it’s something that we normalize so much and we don’t question it. I started reading more and more about insecure work and it got me to discover the job of a picker. Logistics industry being an industry that is rife with precarious Labour. This job to me was just so surprising the way it existed. You know, when companies brag about how fast the parcel gets to you, you rarely imagine someone that is surrounded by millions of items being told by a scanner. like down to the seconds how long they have to get to the next item. It felt like kind of dystopian and it felt important to show that reality.

Coco Khan you have those scenes where workers are being essentially hounded by the beep of a machine saying go faster. And it’s, you know, the juxtaposition of some of the sort of ridiculous, absurd items that they’re picking up that are meaningless and not important and the stress of someone trying to get it to you. I mean, how did you pick out all these little details, how did you come to them?

Laura Carreira So a lot of them came from conversations that I had with pickers, questioning like, what do you do every day? What do you do outside work? Like, how is your routine? It felt like people were actually really engaged to tell me about their lives. I think all of these ridiculous things, like, you know, how the rewards can be like chocolate bars, you know, that really don’t seem to like be rewarding the hard work that is behind it. People know what’s going on, you know, and I think they, they understand these dynamics and, you know, they’re, they’re very happy to share their stories when they’re asked.

Coco Khan I’m glad you mentioned food there because it was one of the details that stood out to me. The lead character is always eating bread all the time because it’s quick and it’s easy and it’s cheap. Sometimes portrayals of poverty can fall into sensationalism. In Les Mis, in Les Miserables, I’m pretty sure one of the characters sells their teeth. In this, it’s the subtle little details of every day that lead to despair. There’s not this big, massive thing that happens. It’s just a small incident. In this case, it was the simplicity of a phone screen smashing and that knocking on the knock on effects to like, can’t pay this bill, can’t socialize with people. Now you’re feeling isolated. Now your confidence is not. Now you’re all alone and you captured that really, really well. I suppose what stayed with you? What were the testimonies from the workers that haunted you and what was something that didn’t make it into the film? It existed in almost all the conversation.

Laura Carreira that I had, the sense that maybe another job would also not fix their problem. And I think it comes from this sense of vulnerability, you know, or experiences this insecurity that is financial, but then she’s also, like you said, it kind of taints all other aspects of her life. And I think it’s also what it does to you, you know, like to your sense of self, because a lot of the conversations were obviously around how like physically demanding the job is. But then a lot of the times these conversations would turn slightly darker and kind of, you know, people would say how actually psychologically it was really difficult to be on your own for that amount of hours. And then also, you know, by the end of the day, if you’re too tired that you can only kind of rest, then it’s also very hard to develop a life outside work. And so, yeah, you slowly begin to, you know, get more and more isolated. And yeah, that was part of the struggle that I was trying to bring into the film. Also because so many of these topics sometimes are kind of framed within like the individual’s fault. This entire discourse of placing the blame in the individual is completely wrong to me. And when so many of us are struggling with these things, I think it’s more and more important to start looking at it collectively.

Coco Khan Yeah. Well, when they call it a livelihood for a reason, it’s meant to enhance your life rather than deprive you of life. This is just a small tangent. But when my mum moved to this country, her husband worked at the Ford factory. We’re from East London. There were loads of South Asians working at the Ford factory. And she talks about how a lot of their friends were from the Ford factory and everyone kind of knew each other from the Ford factory. And I often think about that. I’m sure the work itself wasn’t the greatest, but they have this real vibrant community and essentially like. the job is made great by the other people and you do have a little bit of that these little bits of light from other people but there’s clearly a relationship isn’t it between exploitation and migration i just wondered what your thoughts were when you explored this film

Laura Carreira Yeah. I mean, I think I brought a lot of my experiences over those first years of moving to Scotland. So I moved to Scotland 12 years ago from Portugal. I was 18. It was the first time that I started working. And I think those first jobs, you know, those first minimum wage jobs really kind of made me look at life slightly differently. And I think, yeah, any time, you know, you move to another country and you don’t have the social ties, then, you know, your life becomes slightly more defined by work and your you’re put in a position of more vulnerability. As I was researching, I realized a lot of the workers I was speaking to were migrant workers. And so it felt like it was important to bring my own experiences into the film.

Coco Khan Over the past few years, workers at these distribution warehouses, or fulfillment centers as they’re sometimes called, which I think is really dystopian work. Little ironic. Little ironic. Uh, they’ve been demanding better paying conditions. So a 2024 survey of frontline workers by Quinnix found that 60 % of them experienced workplace stress, 39 % blame low pay for it. Many people say, just go and get another job. Why do you think people put up with it?

Laura Carreira I think necessity, you know, there’s that idea of like, oh, yeah, you can go out and get a better job. I think a lot of the people I talked to questioned that actually, because that was sometimes something I even questioned, you know, are you looking for another job? And sometimes I’d get the answer. I don’t know if another job is going to fix my situation. So there was that real sense of like, that the job was almost also, you know, not just removing the agency that you have over the work that you do, but also like a sense of hope. in the future and you know what you could go on to do. And I think that’s maybe also what kind of contributes to sometimes this idea that like you’re stuck, you’re just trying to keep up and you’re not moving. Yeah.

Coco Khan Yeah, I do want to talk about the the performance monitoring because I’m in listen, my instinct is from just even just talking to my own relatives in an anecdotal way that there’s something about this particular moment, which is uniquely disturbing about it. And it’s the tech element of it. So a survey by the GMB union last November reported that Amazon workers were stressed and burnt out. There’s been attempted suicides recorded at multiple warehouses. The numbers are genuinely quite shocking. Ambulances have been called out over 1 ,400 times. the past five years. A spokesperson for Amazon refuted this suggestion that it’s dangerous to work for them. They said that safety is always the absolute priority. In your research, did you find that the more tech there is involved, the less hopeful the situation is, the less good it is for wellbeing?

Laura Carreira It was interesting because sometimes I would ask, what is the rate? Like how many items are you expected to pay per hour? And people really struggled to give me a number. And this is because I realized it was hidden within this algorithm that actually they would only know if they did well or not well at the end of the week.

Coco Khan Oh wow, so you just live in fear the whole time?

Laura Carreira Yeah. And I, I sometimes heard people say to me, Oh, some days I thought I did quite well and then I would find out I was wrong. And then other days I thought, okay, you know, there’s been a couple of missed items, I think I’m going to get into trouble and then they would be considered the top pickers. And so there was this real disconnect even from what was demanded of you. And the same from like, you know, when I would ask about like relationships with managers and you know, what the sort of management was like, sometimes I was told, Oh, you know, they’re just kind of. saying what the computer is saying you know it’s like they they also don’t really have a real sense of what the goals are right and it was part of what i was trying to look at the film is actually how it’s really hard to like notice where power is coming from because it seems like it doesn’t exists, but it is coming from somewhere.

Coco Khan The government is attempting to make life in the gig economy a little bit better. Labour’s Employment Rights Bill is back in the Commons this week. It’s full of ideas to improve working conditions. It’s been received well by trade unions and introduces tougher restrictions on exploitative zero -hour contracts, also fire and rehire practices. However, the bill doesn’t go quite as far as some people would have liked. Trade unions and lawyers have argued for a single worker’s status that would give gig economy workers more protections. But from your point of view. What do you think you really need to see from government? What were the things that stood out to you as being sort of low -hanging fruit to protect the wellbeing mentally and physically of these workers?

Laura Carreira Of course, protecting people from zero hour contracts would be great. Giving them rights straight from the first day of employment, fantastic. I know that the bill was also gonna propose the right to disconnect and I think now that’s kind of been dropped. So that’s kind of a shame because again, it’s just assuming that our free time should still be consumed by work. And also protecting workers that are trying to unionize in their workplaces, you know. in a lot of warehouses, it is extremely hard to unionize. And we’ve seen a few efforts in the UK that so far haven’t been successful and they haven’t been successful because it is so hard to get enough numbers and then companies hire a bunch of workers right at the time when vote is happening to dilute the vote. So yeah, it is incredibly hard. And I feel like those jobs also seem to be designed in a way that prevent people from forming connections with their colleagues. the breaks aren’t long enough for people to get to know each other. This was something I heard a lot. The turnover is so high that people don’t stay in the job for long enough to like form meaningful bonds and like trying to fight for better working conditions. So yeah, it’s, it’s good if at least some of these rights can be fought, you know, democratically from, from the government for sure.

Coco Khan I definitely had a thought being like, also pay them more. I sometimes read up so many pieces about being like, how do we solve the inner work poverty crisis? And I think, well, I’ve got an idea.

Laura Carreira And also tax companies, you know, there’s a lot of money out there that could be taxed. We were out of breaking!

Coco Khan Having spent a long time immersed in this world, meeting real people and all their problems that they face, but also their human beauty, their camaraderie, do you have hope that things could get better if we just know about them a little bit more?

Laura Carreira Yeah, I do have hope. I think, you know, part of the ending of the film was a little bit about that. A few pickers I was in contact with got in touch in this week to tell me that their warehouses experienced these outages and that during that time, managers weren’t sure when the system was going to go back up. So they just played games, got to know each other, even like they got to know each other’s names, which seemed like something so simple and yet really Humanizing And so to me, that moment, I think represented something about how the possibilities are there for us to build another world and to build a life outside work and how the world doesn’t end if we stop it. And so it’s a glimpse into what could be and how easy and quickly we could get there if there was will.

Coco Khan It’s a really, really touching, beautiful ending, given that it’s human connection that is what will improve the life of workers, both on an emotional level, but also in terms of organizing. Are you in a…

Laura Carreira Like, how have your union experiences been? I am, I am part of a union and it is good to know that, you know, collectively we’re fighting for better rights within the industry because it’s also a really tough industry to be part of. You know, it can be precarious. It’s also an industry that has a lot of issues in terms of, you know, accessing it. Yeah. And I believe that, you know, being part of the union helps us kind of tackle those things.

Coco Khan listeners know, I’m in two. Nice. Oh, yes. It’s not a competition, but I am in two, but you are winning. Exactly. Laura Carrera, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. Thank you. You’re winning. on Falling is out in cinemas now, go and check it out. So Nish, I know we spoke about the Kings playlist at the top of the show. I can’t let it go. We have got to talk about this. For anyone that’s missed it, he’s done a colLabouration with Apple Music to release the Kings Music Room that features music from the Commonwealth. So I don’t know what you think about this. Is it a PR win? Some of the songs are genuinely quite interesting. He’s got Grace Jones on there. He’s got Bob Marley on there. He’s got Anushka Shankar on there, who is your friend, no Nish?

Nish Kumar Yeah, you don’t necessarily expect to see the Kingmaker playlist and recognize one of the names.

Coco Khan Yeah, that’s your mate!

Nish Kumar Yeah, all of that is a bit of a surprise. I mean, listen, so the premise of this is that it’s a King’s playlist to cover songs from Britain and the Commonwealth. And I guess in lieu of returning the stolen jewels that were taken from a lot of these countries, they’re just going to have to make do with King Charles putting, I guess, songs by people from their countries on a playlist.

Coco Khan I think that is right, yeah, yeah, yeah

Nish Kumar I guess this is like in lieu of giving back the Koh -i -noor diamond to India, Shankar’s on a playlist.

Coco Khan Oh my god –

Nish Kumar That’s the compensation for it. Every country, if you demand, like, we need to get some Greek musicians on there to avoid giving them back the Parthenon marbles, like, we might as well extend out this program of playlist -based diplomacy.

Coco Khan I feel like we could do a better job, so what do you think? What would be some cool tunes for the alternative King’s playlist?

Nish Kumar Well, obviously, God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols surely is in there. I mean, maybe like the National Anthem by Radiohead is an alternative National Anthem. Vossy Bop by Stormzy, just because it would be funny for the King to include in his playlist a song that features the line, fuck the government and fuck Boris.

Coco Khan Surely you were going to put forward some Bob Dylan, I mean I’m surprised at you.

Nish Kumar I’m always putting forward Bob Dylan, Coco. I’m always putting forward Bob Dylan. I’m going to Tulsa next week to do a tour show. And that is only the secondary reason for me to go there. And the primary reason is for me to visit the Bob Dylan Center, which is the largest collection of Bob Dylan’s papers in the entire world. Anything like Time Zero Changing, Only a Porn in Their Game, Throne of Death of Hattie Carroll. These would all be interesting songs to stick in there. There’s about 10 songs wrote that are my girlfriend’s gone on holiday to Italy and I’m sad. and the rest of them are all rich people are the worst, racism is awful, we’ve got to get rid of all of these useless people that are doing all of these terrible things to us. That’s basically, that’s basically a curt summation of most of Bob Dylan’s recorded output between 1962 and 1965.

Coco Khan I took it really seriously, this challenge, and I’ve got some suggestions. Yeah, you can veto them if you want, but don’t write to. OK, so Kelly Clarkson’s because of you. That song, incidentally, is about a child who will not make the same mistakes as their parents. So what do you think? He’s trying to be he lived in the Queen’s shadow, right? He’s trying to be…

Nish Kumar Yeah, that’d be good. That’d be a positive song for him to sing, I think.

Coco Khan Okay, Destiny’s Childs, Bills, Bills, Bills, because the chorus is like, you know, can you pay my bills? Can you pay my telephone bills? Which is basically his message to the public.

Nish Kumar Ha, ha, ha.

Coco Khan thumbs up

Nish Kumar Yeah, I like that. I like that. Definitely thumbs up.

Coco Khan Okay, bye bye. From Australia, Midnight Oil, Beds Are Burning is a song about the theft of Indigenous land.

Nish Kumar Yeah, great, but I’m very bored with that.

Coco Khan So apparently we are actually going to make this into a, a genuine playlist. So if you want to have a listen to the songs.

Nish Kumar It’s not a genuine playlist. We’re gonna make it into a genuine playlist. We’re not gonna…

Coco Khan Riding my pony, King Charles! riding my pony, King Charles.

Nish Kumar Yeah, Pod Save the UK is not going to put out our bespoke genuine playlist.

Coco Khan Oh my god that would be so good if it was just riding my pony is excellent for a king charles playlist he’s a horsey guy no? And that’s it! Thanks for listening to Pod Save the UK, and a reminder that we want your questions for our upcoming Mailbag special. If you’ve got a burning question for Nish and me, drop us a line at psuk@reducedlistening.co.uk. We’ll be pulling these out in a couple of weeks, and check out our show notes if you want to hear our counter -programming for the Kings playlist.

Nish Kumar Don’t forget to follow at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. And we’re on blue sky now to follow us at Pod Save the UK dot crooked dot com. And if you want more of us, make sure you’re subscribed to the YouTube channel.

Coco Khan Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.

Nish Kumar Thanks to Senior Producer James Tinsdale and Producer May Robson.

Coco Khan Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Nish Kumar The executive producers are Will Yates, Tanya Hines, Madeline Herringer and Katie Long, with additional support from Ari Schwartz.

Coco Khan And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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