From Chelsea to Sports Direct, the best weapon against bad bosses is shame

They’ll probably go down in history as the three most expensive words José Mourinho ever said. Nearly a year after the former Chelsea manager allegedly shouted “filha da puta” at team doctor Eva Carneiro – after she ran on to the pitch to treat an injured player – his old club has forked out a reported £5m to settle her claim for sex discrimination and unfair dismissal. Predictably, some eyebrows were raised: five million smackers, just for being called rude names in Portuguese? Would that we were all so mistreated by our bosses.
But the money isn’t for the insult. It’s partly in recognition of the fact that Carneiro will probably never work at this level in football again, even though she did nothing wrong (the settlement covers future lost earnings, and she was on £286,000 a year – or roughly what the player she was treating earns in 10 days).

Yet mostly the money is buying silence. The club insists the supposedly scandalous allegations she was due to make in court were unfounded, but it would still rather pay millions than let anyone hear them. And lo, the phenomenally lucrative business of top-flight football is free to carry on without embarrassing public scrutiny of its attitudes to women, or indeed to players’ welfare. Nothing to see here. Everybody move along.

So perhaps we should be grateful that it’s not yet possible to buy your way out of appearing before parliament. This week two separate inquiries by the Commons business, innovation and skills committee – one on the collapse of BHS, another on employment practices at the bargain sportswear chain Sports Direct – collided into jaw-dropping moments of hideous clarity. This was parliament doing what it’s supposed to do, holding the boss class to account on behalf of the workers. The stories that emerged were enough to boil the blood
Sports Direct staff having their pay docked for being a minute late. A woman giving birth in the toilets at their warehouse, according to Unite union witnesses, because despite being heavily pregnant she didn’t dare miss work – calling in sick could get you fired. You had to remind yourself this was 21st-century Britain, not some Victorian mill with children working the looms.

And then there was Dominic Chappell, the former bankrupt to whom BHS’s former owner Philip Green inexplicably flogged a business on which 11,000 livelihoods depended. The staff were so keen to make a go of it under their new owner that some even volunteered to help repaint their own dilapidated stores. In return, they got a boss described by ex-BHS executives as a “mythomaniac”, a “Premier League liar”, a man with his fingers in the till.

The retail group’s chief executive testified that, when confronted about stripping money from the business, Chappell threatened to “come down there and kill you”. The final irony is that, in its death throes, BHS came within a whisker of being sold off to none other than Sports Direct’s Mike Ashley. Frying pan, meet fire.

And the shocking thing isn’t just that all this was unfolding under our noses, in familiar high street brands. It’s that we are surprisingly powerless to do much about it. Carneiro may have been abominably treated, but at least the law was eventually there to protect her. The culture of fear created in Ashley’s warehouse, where workers were seemingly too terrified for their jobs to exercise their own legal rights, may sound immoral but it wasn’t necessarily illegal.

Which makes it far from clear who will hold him to his blustering promises, when finally dragged before the committee, that things are going to change. Presumably not the 88% of shareholders who backed Ashley against Unite’s attempts to oust him last autumn.

And probably not consumers either, even though some will now decide to get their cheap trainers elsewhere. Boycotting things – whether it’s battery-farmed chickens, T-shirts made using child labour, or zero-hours employers – is a luxury reserved for those who can afford to pay slightly more.

Ethical shopping is unlikely to be the answer to companies operating on the cruellest of margins, because so often their customers can’t actually afford to go elsewhere. And so the low-paid get screwed twice over: screwed if the only jobs they can get are insecure and exploitative, but screwed too if they can’t get the kids’ PE kit from shops as cheap as Sports Direct.

Strong unions are clearly part of the answer. So is tougher regulation, intelligently constructed for industries such as retail whose working practices are changing dramatically and often invisibly as they move online.

But none of that will happen overnight. The Liberal Democrats had to fight like tigers to get the mildest measures on zero-hours contracts past their Conservative coalition partners. Imagine how enthusiastic David Cameron will feel about tougher employment laws after a referendum in which his core vote has raged against Brussels red tape.

By the time another Labour government is elected, meanwhile, retail warehouses will probably be filling up with staff who won’t need loo breaks or lunchtimes, who can be treated like robots because that’s exactly what they will be.

So all that’s left is shame. Public shaming is not a weapon to be used lightly, in the era of the online lynch mob. But watch Ashley squirm as he was confronted with the damage his company does to human lives; observe Chappell dropping Green in it under pressure; or Chelsea hammering out a deal in a courtroom corridor. That’s the power of forcing people simply to explain themselves in public, to look the rest of us in the eye and defend what they have done.

There’s nothing dirty about making money, creating jobs, providing your customers with things they need. It’s not inherently wrong either for politicians to involve business people in public life – to make them tsar of this or ambassador for that – if they have both expertise that can’t be found elsewhere and a genuine sense of the public good. But it’s time for the fawning to stop. No more dangling such perks just to rustle up cheap publicity – or worse, to reward support for a political party. No more knighthoods for chancers.

It’s time peerages were removed, invitations withdrawn, polite society closed and cheques returned to anyone who turns out to have got literally stinking rich – to have made fortunes in ways that don’t smell right.

Those who have made it while doing right by their staff, meanwhile, should be shouting from the rooftops in condemnation of those who haven’t. And they should keep shouting until inhumane work practices become as socially unacceptable as drink driving; until governments are forced to listen, and finally emboldened to act.