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Today I spoke at an event on the TUC fringe, alongside trade unionists including Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct nemesis Steve Turner from Unite and Sophie Shaw, a waitress from the Dorchester hotel.

Before the packed fringe meeting, about the fight for decent work, I was convinced of a return in 2016 to New Victorian working practices.

By the time I left, after hearing of the fights of Uber drivers, hotel workers, ASOS factory workers and Sports Direct’s workforce, I was left in no doubt.

The uberisation of our economy sounds like a cool modern phenomenon, but of course it’s really just an old idea served up cold by an exhausted Deliveroo rider.

(Image: Neil Hall/Reuters)

Too many of these new jobs resemble the feudal lord or dockmaster surveying their workers and choosing who will work today.

Feudal lords had more respect for their workers than some of these modern day robber barons. Serfs in the Middle Ages were at least afforded some protection. Victorian factory owners founded libraries and universities and paid their taxes.

And at least no-one added insult to injury by telling their workers they were working for the cool new “gig economy”.

If there’s one image that sums up the New Victorian workplace, it might just be Mike Ashley, arriving at Sports Direct HQ last week pulling handfuls of £50 notes out of his pockets .

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£50 notes that some of his zero hours workers will be lucky to earn in a week.

It was like a cartoon from the Times in 1816, money literally spilling from a rich man’s pockets while poor people complain of workhouse conditions.

In 2016, as in 1816, the story of working poverty is full of these shameful contrasts.

Sir Phillip Greed cruising around the Greek islands on his £100m super-yacht all summer while the stores he ran aground closed one by one, putting 11,000 people out of work. And all the pensioners who put in years to his stores left in limbo, worrying about the gaping £571m hole in the company pension scheme.

(Image: Daily Mirror/John Alevroyiannis)

Let’s remember that when Sir Philip bought the company the pension fund had enough reserves to guarantee everyone their full pension. Now thousands of pensioners are worried about their futures as he drifts about in a floating palace the size of a football pitch.

For the Mirror’s Real Britain column , I recently spoke to a woman called Cherie , who worked for Hermes, the delivery company, for nine years. She told me she was so worried about losing her job she went back to work three days after she gave birth.

She hadn’t had a holiday in seven years and only took three weekends off ever, all for family bereavements.

(Image: Chris Neill / Daily Mirror)

But the saddest thing she said was that her eldest daughter had told her ‘that job ruined my childhood’ – because she was never there for her kids.

Hermes disputes this story.

They are also looking into claims they “hounded” a courier couple to return to work while their dying six-year-old son was on life support following an emergency leg operation.

This isn’t a tiny maverick company. Hermes employs almost 10,000 couriers in the UK who process 200m parcels a year for household names including Next Directory, John Lewis and Sir Phillip Green’s Arcadia Group.

Hermes’ website calls its delivery work being a “lifestyle courier”. Cherie says you don’t have a life. She says what being a ‘lifestyle courier’ really means is that you – not Hermes – pay fuel costs, sick pay, pension contributions, vehicle costs and holiday pay. And the company isn’t obliged to pay minimum wage.

Alarm bells first started ringing for me in 2013, when I started visiting foodbanks for Real Britain . The people I met there were often struggling because of benefit cuts or delays. But an increasing number were in insecure work.

They weren’t getting enough hours, or their wages were too low. They were being sent home after an hour’s work, or no work at all.

The following year I interviewed a woman who worked on the checkout of a big supermarket but was given so few hours she often went straight after work to the foodbank its shoppers supported. She wasn’t on zero hours but was on short hours – that meant the company didn’t have to treat her as a full-time worker.

She told me she couldn’t look at the food going along the conveyor-belt some days because she was so hungry.

So the foodbank was subsidising a major supermarket. Even more outrageously its shoppers – many on low incomes too – were donating tins of food that were going to the workers. Tins of food whose sales increased the profits of the supermarket.

Even the Victorian factory owners hadn’t worked out that scam.

In 2016, we are all addicted to products made by groovy new tech companies with beanbag areas and dress-down-Fridays, but rather old-fashioned attitudes to their factory workers. Companies that dare to say ‘Don’t be evil’ and then deprive our poorest people and our National Health Service of their taxes.

BHS wasn’t one of those companies. It was a good old-fashioned stalwart of the high street, whose greedy bosses stand accused of rapaciously devouring it while apparently giving no thought to current or past staff as they hollowed out the company.

In the last week of BHS, I went to the store in Harrow on the Hill where I met a woman called Jackie who told me how brilliant the atmosphere was in the stockroom. “I’ve worked for BHS for 23 years,” she said. “We’ll keep on smiling until the end.”

Jackie had two kids and didn’t have a clue where she was going to get a job next. She had thought that when she retired she would have had a good pension. Now she had nothing left but an inexhaustible supply of pride.

When I asked her what she thought of Sir Phil and the serial-bankrupt he sold the company to in March last year for £1, she said, three words – ‘bleep, bleep, bleep’.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

And so our economy has come full circle. Globalisation is the new industrialisation. We are back to the evils of piece-work and day-labour the unions fought 100 years ago.

Today TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady made a powerful speech to Congress that demanded the “simple dignity of a fair day’s wage for a hard day’s work”. How shameful that in 2016 in the sixth richest country in the world that basic right must still be fought for.