For the second in this occasional series, I want to look into the mysterious employment status of Miss Rabbit.
Peppa Pig features large in our house, so I have had plenty of opportunity to study this. For the uninitiated, Miss Rabbit runs the supermarket, the rescue helicopter, the train, the bus, the museum gift shop, the space attraction, the kiosk at Duck World, the ice cream van...the list goes on. For me, this raised a few issues, but I am going to focus on Miss Rabbit's employment status. We'll leave consideration of Miss Rabbit and the Working Time Directive, and the discrimination which is clearly preventing married women from holding down a job for another time!
Miss Rabbit appears to work every hour of the day, running pretty much all of the service industry. How can she be employed in so many places at once? There are a number of options:
1) Everything is owned by a single organisation; Miss Rabbit is employed by the umbrella company and deployed on a just-in-time basis. If this is the case, I'd recommend that the organisation looks at their resource and contingency planning, and considers some succession planning / flight risk analysis. On the one occasion where Miss Rabbit is sick, she has to organise her own cover and send her sister (Mrs Rabbit, just in case you wondered!) in to cover all of her jobs for the day. Everything falls apart. An organisation relying solely on one person for success is heading for trouble at some point.
2) Each business is owned by a different organisation; Miss Rabbit is freelance, operating under her own limited company, and invoicing them for time spent. This explains her ability to leap between roles wherever she is required. However, if this is the case, the businesses are exposing themselves to potential risk in the event of an HMRC audit: Miss Rabbit appears to hold a key role in each organisation and it is difficult to see how she could avoid being viewed as an employee, potentially incurring tax and NI liabilities going back to at least 2003. It is also unlikely to be the most cost-effective resourcing method; Miss Rabbit is likely to command a high day rate as she seems to be the only person available for work, and there doesn't seem to be anyone around to validate her invoices and timesheets.
3) Each business is owned by a different organisation, employing Miss Rabbit on zero hours contracts, so that they can just deploy her as needed. A zero hours contract creates an employment relationship, without requiring the employer to commit to a specific volume or pattern of work. It can be viewed as exploitative, potentially demanding commitment from the worker without offering any security. It would also be difficult to manage, and each organisation would need to be aware that Miss Rabbit was accruing annual leave as she worked, and to allow her to take this. Miss Rabbit may view this arrangement as beneficial to her - she is free to hold a number of jobs, although clashes appear to be likely, and it is lucky that there appears to be a community agreement to all travel to work at the same time on the single bus journey of the morning. I presume that on the day she drives the school bus for the trip to the mountains, everyone is happy to find a different route to work! I would urge the businesses, in this situation, to consider whether zero hours contract are the best way to go; they can seem an easy alternative to workload and resource analysis and planning, but increased loyalty and quality commitment could be achieved by offering fixed work patterns.
4) Miss Rabbit owns all of the businesses, and is operating on a shoestring. As the owner of a collection of small businesses, she may feel that she can't afford to employ others on a temporary or permanent basis. However, her businesses may be suffering; if more fully staffed, it is likely that sales in each area would increase, as they would cater more conveniently for the needs of the community. She could consider starting some sort of childcare business (which doesn't appear to currently exist, except for pre-school for a few hours each day), and create childcare capacity which would potentially free Mummy Pig, Mrs Zebra, Mrs Elephant and so on to seek part time work outside the home, should they wish to do so. There is an untapped pool of potentially skilled and keen workers, who are likely to want to work on a part time basis, thus not incurring the cost of full time employees. This would reduce the vulnerability of the businesses, reduce reliance on her, and leave her with more leisure time to enjoy the profits of her work (although it's unclear what she would spend her time doing as she appears to be the only single, childless adult in the community!).
5) We all know how rabbits breed..."Miss Rabbit" may in fact be multiple rabbits, each with a separate full time job, but no-one has noticed because the Rabbit family look so alike (a cynic may think that Miss Rabbit and Mrs Rabbit were in fact the same drawing). In which case, straightforward employment status, and a community that doesn't realise it is overrun by rabbits.
What do you think? I suspect it is 5!
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