SINCE the financial deregulation of the 1980s successive governments have been content to watch the working conditions and wage rates of employees deteriorate.

In the case of the Tories this situation has been encouraged as a result of their determination to neuter the trade unions, while Labour, and especially New Labour, have fallen over themselves to be “business friendly”.

The rot began with employees being obliged to adopt self-employed status in order to obtain employment and morphed into the wholesale use of labour through agencies, who creamed off wages with workers being deprived of many of their previous rights.

Now we have the abomination of people waiting at home in order to be texted as to whether they have any work that day.

What a disgrace.

People of my generation who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s are often accused of looking back to a golden age, but the fact is that it was a golden age for employees with financial inequality narrowing for the only time in living memory.

Even the Tories recognised that a more equal society was in everyone’s interests.

Now we have Ed Balls rather pathetically promising that Labour will remain “business friendly”.

Perhaps he hasn’t connected this appalling labour market with falling tax revenues.

VJ Connor, Bishop Auckland