Ministers should press ahead with a ban on zero-hours contracts, campaigners say, despite claims by business leaders that it would deter hiring and lock more young people out of the labour market.
The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) and the union umbrella organisation the TUC were among eight signatories to a letter to the department of business and trade calling on the government to “ignore the noise” from businesses, which want zero-hours contracts to remain.
I mean, really? Why would anyone listen to actual businesses about how a change in hte law would affect hiring by actually businesses? Pfft, ludicrous, eh?
Zero hours contracts as I think I understand them are an obnoxious but inevitable employers’ reaction against the difficulty of firing people.
Not really. For those businesses where demand is uncertain and intermittent, event staff, say, they are the only practical option. It would be ludicrous to have to hire staff from scratch for each event.
I once worked part time for a company where all staff ( at least on my grade, ) were on zero hours contracts. In theory, we could be called to work at any time, day or night. When this was queried with the Big Cheese at a staff presentation, he replied “Do you think I’m mad? There’s no way I’d ask anyone to do hours they don’t want to do as they’d promptly leave!” Which, having been given a week’s paid training was clearly not in his interests. In practice, I had regular hours and was invited to work extra when required, which suited me just fine at the time.
What is a much more reasonable objection is where such a contract precludes them working for anyone else. But would such a contract be legal? I have my doubts.
At the sort of level where zero hours contracts are used, staff turnover, and staff just not turning up is likely to be quite an issue. Employees aren’t entirely without power to spoil the bosses day.
What is a much more reasonable objection is where such a contract precludes them working for anyone else.
I might have misunderstood what these contracts are, but I was under the impression that precluding people from working elsewhere was a feature of them.
From what I can see, it’s not that the contract says you cannot work elsewhere it’s that it is impossible to work elsewhere. It’s not like temping where you’re an employee of an agency which can offer you work with anyone. It’s more like being self-employed but having only one customer who may or may not have work for you.
I think …
“What is a much more reasonable objection is where such a contract precludes them working for anyone else. But would such a contract be legal? I have my doubts.”
They literally are not legal. There was a law change around that a few years ago.
The truth is, it yeah, suits events, suits peaks and troughs in demand. It suits people who want to not work a particular day. It suits students that need to do exams. It suits mothers that don’t want to work in school holidays.
Cinema is a huge one, because if you get a real blockbuster, or even a couple of blockbusters that hit together (like Barbie and Oppenheimer) you need every person you can get for ticket checking and serving popcorn. Super Mario Bros? Also lots of people but the demand is not evening as it’s a kids movie. And the information comes at short notice.
“In practice, I had regular hours and was invited to work extra when required, which suited me just fine at the time”
My daughter did some waitressing in the 6th form. Which was really a Saturday job. I don’t remember her ever not doing it, except when she didn’t want to. Now and again she’d want to go to a gig and tell them a few weeks before. But she also did some Sundays and the odd evenings. No doubt someone going to a midweek gig. And it seemed to me that she and Pizza Hut had a good relationship, some give and take.
100%. My three did various jobs during sixth form/university. Not zero hours but minimal hours and very often did more than contracted.
Worked well for all concerned, except Dads taxi.
ZHCs are essential for cost control in the care sector. Agency staff are very expensive, but a bank of people on ZHCs can cover holidays, sickness, resignations, sackings etc much more cheaply.
but a bank of people on ZHCs can cover holidays, sickness, resignations, sackings etc much more cheaply.
In one such example, it was, IIRC, Priti Patel who authorised the importation of 1,000 Zimbabwean ‘care workers’, each one of whom brought over 10 – yes, 10 – dependants also to live here.
In terms of cost control, read that and weep …
It seems quite important to you that ZHCs are EVIL! Perhaps you should talk to the people who benefit from the flexibility
Nope, you have me mistaken for someone else.
But I think a lot of commentary on Tim’s post is misguided, because a lot of it comes from people who are self-employed and who know how hard that can be. So my take on a lot of the comments here is that it’s kind of ‘stop whingeing, it’s just self-employment, deal with it’, plus ‘some people like it’. But I don’t think those objections deal with what I think the complaint is.
Btw, within a few years I will be in the fourth decade of running my own business. No one has to persuade me of how hard it can be. Plus, employees, if they can be dispensed with, usually will be dispensed with. And before I ran my own business, I was a temp, and I did casual work – from furniture removal to bar work.
But I don’t think the complaint about ZHC really concerns self-employment, at least, not the complaint I’ve been trying to articulate. As I’ve said, I accept that ZHC – or casual labour – works for some people, and always has. Yes, that is a form of self-employment and yes, it works for some people in some sectors.
Some years, for self-employed people are really good. Some bad. Some indifferent.
But, take this bloke I know. Bit of a twat, tbf. Still and all, he got a job, supposedly, with a market research company. The work is not seasonal. Nor is it erecting marquees at 2am or something like that, something with big upswings and downswings where you need people all of a sudden and pay accordingly. It’s just an ordinary job.
As far as I can tell, it fits the casual labour/ZHC model, tho’. So, in theory, he has a 9-6 job, Monday to Friday and, most of the time, if the company is doing ok, that is what happens. But, at the flick of a switch, he can be told they’ve got nothing for him next week. And, it can happen that at the end of the next week they say the same thing. And if those things happen, then he is not paid.
So, he gets the risks of self-employment, but none of the benefits. He does not get good years. All he get is years which if he is lucky conform to expectations, plus years which don’t. Added to which, as a practical matter, it’s almost impossible for him to fill those gaps of non-work. Because he’s not a plasterer or a kitchen porter who can be fitted in anywhere at any time. He’s got one client, who may or may not pay him and, as a practical matter, it is very difficult to polyfilla his one’s client’s coming up short.
He can apply for other jobs, but how do you parlay what he’s got into something regular? He wants regular, like a lot of people. Nothing wrong with that, provided they pull their weight. Lots of work suits ‘regular’. 9-6, Monday to Friday. It often works for employers.
You’ve also mistaken me for someone else because I don’t blame employers for casual labour becoming normal for those kinds of jobs. If you look closely, you’ll see that I have not called them ‘EVIL’. As I’ve said, their reaction is a normal reaction given the employment market which has been created and which is beyond their control.
Postscript: I did not get the ZHC thing, until I met that bloke. I just assumed it was the usual Guardian agitation whereby everyone gets a free-ride except their deemed baddies. I assumed it was stupid whingeing about self-employment. But having met the bloke, I think his situation is crappy. He may be a twat, but he at least wants to do an honest day’s work and yet, from an employer’s perspective, an employment contract is too high a risk. Seems to me that that is shitty all round and it doesn’t need to be happening.
from an employer’s perspective, an employment contract is too high a risk.
There you have it. De-risk employment for employers, and you’ll get more full-timers. Government is doing the opposite, whilst also making employees much costlier. What is the expected result? What we see.
A small company I do IT for recently morphed from having employees to being an “association of consultants”, effectively the same staff but now on ZHCs. Why? They’d have gone bust if they hadn’t. The cost and bureaucracy of employment would have sunk them.
Amusingly, the lefty founder thinks Stella Creasy is brilliant. Some people never learn.
Isn’t this just the usual method of only listening to those who will give you the answer that you want?
Has anyone asked the people being hired on zero hour contracts what THEY think?
JuliaM , Yes they did, and found that the vast majority of people on such contracts were quite happy.
Obviously that won’t get in the way of those who want to get rid of ZHC’s though, as they aren’t interested in what people want, only what they want.
It’s worse than that; they think people aren’t capable of knowing what they really want.
The vanguard know what are the real and true interests of the proletariat, while the proletariat are misled by their false consciousness….etc
Zero-hours people are not unionised. Bit of a problem, that.
McDonalds polled their staff and 92% of them are happy with their current contract status.
It is interesting to see how successful employers manage their staff
In my travels I have noted that the median age of McDonalds employees seems to be rising
Far fewer spotty youths, more middle aged, gusting elderly
They all seem to be cheerful, well turned out and efficient
Their managers seem to be on the ball too
Maybe its just the time of day I visit
Isn’t today’s youth all signed off as sick?
Well yes, when it’s the boss polling who’s going to say your system is shit?
Most people. I don’t know where you work, but most workplaces aren’t the commie dream of fat cats whipping people. They want to know to improve things.
The thing every critic of ZHCs doesn’t realise is that ZHCs are a hassle. They’re more work than someone working a fixed pattern. A waitress tells you on Saturday she won’t be working the following one, you’re now got to poll all the other waitresses.
The benefit to employers is accessing more labour options. Students, mothers, retired people. But it is more work to organise.
The only reason unions are sticking their oar in is they want more rubes joining unions.
ZHCs work when your business is submit and dispatch. IT field support, you’re not going to pay people to sit in the office waiting for a field call, the field call gets booked and a field engineer has that call-out added to their booking diary.
Zero hours is an exaggeration, like nut zero. After a couple of weeks of literally no hours, the employee would tell the employer to get knotted.
I worked as a casual through university. It didn’t pay the rent, but it supplied much-needed calories and the occasional bottle of cheap wine.
I used to think that ‘zero-hours’ was just a rebranding of being self-employed by the usual leftie agitators and for sure there is some of that going on. But I also think there’s more to it than that. Yes, it works fine for school pupils and students, or others for whom casual/occasional work is suitable.
But there is a problem if you don’t want to be self-employed and you are looking for a full-time job. As I understand it, in those circs, if you’re offered a zero-hours contract – and maybe that’s all you can get especially in a stagnant economy stuffed with imported workers – what you’re basically being offered is work, maybe, and therefore pay, maybe. So, the employer gets a worker on tap, the worker gets the best opportunity on offer. But it’s a crappy opportunity produced by a sclerotic employment market rather than a crappy opportunity as a by-product of being an unattractive worker – i.e. the crappiness isn’t necessarily the fault of the worker, it’s the fault of the sclerosis.
Answer – I think – liberalise the employment market. Some will sink, but they always do. However, more will float than can at the moment.
So I agree that there is no place for banning zero-hours contracts, I just don’t think they’d be a major feature of the employment market but for the way that market has been gummed up by precisely the sort of interference now once more sought by the same leftie agitators.
Zero-hours was a rebranding of casual labour. Students who wanted a few hours here and there to pick up some extra cash, ditto the not-quite-retired, mums of school-age kids etc. etc.
That sounds about right.
What seems to have happened is that casual labour has become a fairly normal form of ’employment’ as distinct from one form among many.
You’ve codified my mitherings for me, thank you.
Nearly every human being wants a zero-hours contract with everything they do. Get your haircut? You pay for the haircut. Car fixed? Pay for the car fixing. Fish and chips? Cash.
No-one wants to partially employ the chippy, binding them into £10/month retainer for fish and chips. No-one wants an exit fee for leaving Netflix. But what a horror if people just want them to do the same thing.
I fucking hate this scene, because it’s all people who think they deserve to be part of the furniture. That it’s “my job”. No, you are the guy at the chipshop, the hairdresser, the mechanic, the whore. And if you aren’t leaving work every day thinking you added value, you’d better figure out how to because people will can you for not. Every child should be raised thinking that being an entrepreneur, a producer is the default.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyL7TG6SzDU
“Zero-hours was a rebranding of casual labour”
Indeed. They’re trying to make it sound like the days when dockers would turn up every day and if lucky get some work and if not go hungry.
There may be some jobs where that happens but I’m not aware of them and as discussed here today and in the past, quite a lot of people like the flexibility of ZHCs. But of course the laws are decided by salaried people who’ve never taken a risk in their lives.
…and are contemptuous of those who have.
But what if that’s all that’s available? Work, maybe? Seems to me the options are then sign up, or don’t.
Yup. My point is that I don’t think this situation needs to have arisen. It’s a classic case of government bollocksing around with things and then proposing to bollocks around some more when the consequences of the first set of bollocksing become apparent.
Benefits can be a zero hours contract except you get paid not to work for anybody at all.
An entire industry (the North Sea) was based on zero hours contracts.
In fact, operators and contractors had carve outs from nearly all employment legislation.
I was fired hundreds of times. Then rehired.
Perhaps this thing about ZHCs is the bureaucrats’ revenge on a successful industry.
The only part which should be played by government in a contract agreed between two willing parties is to maintain a system for rapid resolution of disputes. And they can’t even do that.
Tangential: Child Poverty Action Group is bogus.
Children don’t have assets. They are all poor, totally dependent on others.
‘Child poverty’ is a commie trick to get people to accept public support of THE PARENTS.
“It’s for the children!”
No, not really.