Zero hours contracts have taken up a lot of bandwidth and airwaves today.
There is a narrative that goes something like: “There might not be mass unemployment but the jobs created under this government are all zero hours contracts”. That is nonsense. The proportion of the workforce on zero hours contracts is actually very small. It’s only about 2% of all jobs.
If exploitation is going on, even if it’s only a handful of people being exploited, it needs to be stopped. There’s no doubt about that. And Liberal Democrats in Government have stopped the scandal of exclusivity, the practice of not guaranteeing your employee any hours or any pay, but not letting them work for anyone else either. We’re way ahead of Labour.
Jo Swinson said at her campaign launch on Monday that she was thinking about something like ensuring that people would automatically have rights if they were working consistent hours over a certain period, so she and Labour are not a million miles apart. However, I think that we need to be sure that thee won’t be any unintended consequences from such a policy. Think about it. If you were an unscrupulous employer, would you be inclined to make sure that your employees didn’t build up that consistent work pattern? Labour’s policy might not be the simple solution that they are trying to make out.
The way they talk, they make it sound like zero hours contracts are Very Very Bad. If that is the case, why do so many of their MPs and Councils employ people on that basis. The Daily Fail (sorry) reported back in May last year that over 60 Labour MPs used the practice. Five of ours did, but we have not said that they are intrinsically wrong, recognising that they do actually suit some people. In August 2013, Channel 4 reported that hundreds of workers for Labour Councils were employed on zero hours contracts.
Labour’s proposals announced today seem to be watered down from those here on the Labour website. What’s particularly interesting is that Ed Miliband isn’t the first Labour leader to talk about the evils of zero hours contracts. I guess that’s partly because Labour want people to think that they were an invention of the Evil Coalition. Well, guess what. Tony Blair said he would ban them way back in 1995. That’s 20 years ago. And you might remember that for 13 of those years, Labour were in Government and Blair was Prime Minister.
Labour have failed to meet their 20 year promise to ban zero hours contracts http://t.co/ZvSvdk9nsW#GE2015pic.twitter.com/A1Tcgl09RQ
— Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) April 1, 2015
They looked at banning them in 1998 and then decided not to because business wouldn’t like it.
So the Liberal Democrat record in government is better than Labour’s and if anyone thinks the Tories would have given a monkey’s armpit about the issue, then they are sadly misguided. To recap, the Liberal Democrats introduced legislation last year to ban exclusivity and to give people the right to request a fixed hours contract after 26 weeks. It’s a balanced and proportionate approach to the issue.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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20 Comments
As I rarely agree with you Caron I just had to post. Well said Caron. However neither BBC nor Channel Four News stated that it was the Liberal Democrats who changed the law on zero contracts. We have a good story to tell here but I don’t think the public will hear it.
I don’t see how the government can be “way ahead” of Labour on zero-hour contracts when they have increased 15-fold in the life of this parliament (now somewhere north of 700,000.. yes, that doesn’t sound quite so insignificant)
Zero hours contracts were not a big deal 5 years ago. They are now and Labour have capitalised. That Lib Dems introduced legislation was unknown to me so why should a typical voter know. Why should Labour and Tories tell them. We should have been on the attack today addressing this. We are really really bad at promoting what we have done and letting others dominate the agenda.
@WildColonialBoy 1st Apr ’15 – 10:09pm
But how many of those people want to change that contract? Plenty of evidence showing that most people on them are happy with the hours they work.
Are they ideal? Far from it, but it certainly is a case of Labour blowing something out of all proportion – especially when so many of their MPs (I’m looking at you, Ed Balls!) used them. If they are fine for Labour to use, why are they not so for everyone else?
It’s a bit unfair to attack someone fir not doing something sooner that they want to do now. Surely we should applaud the desire to do the right thing now. Otherwise we’d all be constantly harking back to past lost opportunities rather than focussing on moving forward. I’m not interested in, for instance, saying why didn’t the Coalition do x y or z in their five years – I’m only interested in what they plan to do in the next five years.
Personally, I don’t give a fig about who is doing what on zero hours contracts, personally I would have applauded the Nasty Party if they had taken the decisions the Lib Dems and Labour have done.
I have to say though, that not taking the actuality into account when writing this article is a little cheeky. We know that there are two ways of measuring zero hours contract that the ONS uses. One uses how employees perceive their contract and, indeed, under this measurement the numbers come out at 697,000. However, taking the measurement of how many contracts do not have guarenteed hours, the number is 1,800,000 – up 400,000.
A personal note. A neighboour of mine, a father of three, only discovered the other day that he was on a zero hours contract. Under one of the measurements above his contract is not represented whilst in the other it is !
I don’t think the message about banning exclusivity on zero hours contracts has got out there. I had a small business owner telling me yesterday that Miliband was right about zero hours, until I told him Vince Cable had already banned exclusivity, which is the real problem.
These are all good point caron – but there is another very important one which is that many people are happy with zero hours contracts. A study from the independent CIPD found that :
Zero-hours workers, when compared to the average UK employee, are just as satisfied with their job (60% versus 59%), happier with their work-life balance (65% vs 58%), and less likely to think they are treated unfairly by their organisation (27% vs 29%).
Zero-hours workers are, on average, nearly twice as likely to be satisfied with having no minimum set contracted hours, as they are to be dissatisfied. Almost half (47%) say they are satisfied compared with around a quarter (27%) who report being dissatisfied. The most common explanation for this is that flexible working suits their current circumstances (44% of those saying they are satisfied or very satisfied with having no minimum set contracted hours).
http://www.cipd.co.uk/pressoffice/press-releases/cipd-research-zero-hours-contracts-unfairly-demonised-oversimplified-261113.aspx
The CIPD report also says —
> One in five zero-hours workers say they are sometimes (17%) or always (3%) penalised if they are not available for work.
>. Almost half of zero-hours workers say they receive no notice at all (40%) or find out at the beginning of an expected shift (6%) that work has been cancelled, and only about a third of employers tell us they make a contractual provision or have a formal policy outlining their approach to arranging (32%) and cancelling work (34%) for zero-hours workers.
> One in five (21%) zero-hours workers believe their pay is lower than comparable permanent staff doing similar jobs, while one in ten employers (11%) report that this is the case.
> In fact, almost two-thirds (64%) of employers who use zero-hours workers report that hourly rates for these staff are about the same as an employee doing the same role on a permanent contract.
> Nearly a fifth (18%) report that hourly rates for zero-hours staff are higher than permanent employees (with the proportion slightly higher in the private sector).
> Confusion among some employers and zero-hours staff over employment status and rights. For example, 42% of zero-hours staff don’t know if they have the right to take legal action if unfairly dismissed after two years service.
http://www.cipd.co.uk/pressoffice/press-releases/cipd-research-zero-hours-contracts-unfairly-demonised-oversimplified-261113.aspx
Simon McGrath 2nd Apr ’15 – 8:55am…..These are all good point caron – but there is another very important one which is that many people are happy with zero hours contracts. A study from the independent CIPD ….
To give its title the “Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development” (CIPD) represents “professional” people who by definition are in demand and can handle such contracts…It does not represent “Joe Bloggs’ who works in a fast food store….
Even so, it’s findings included the fact that 20% of these professionals believe that they are penalised for not being available at times inconvenient to them….
Quoting the CIPD on such matters is like asking the GMC to rule on hospital porters….
Labour only started talking about zero-hours contracts when the Coalition (Vince Cable’s BIS dept in particular) announced they were going to review them with a view to outlawing some of the abuses (such as exclusivity clauses).
I worked on a zero-hours contract for about a year after I left University in 1992 during a recession. From the employer’s point of view they made it easy to hire people when they weren’t themselves sure about how much work they could offer (this was certainly true in banqueting, which is where I worked as a waiter). Has they been banned – or effectively banned, as Labour now seem to want – it’s likely the company would have hired a smaller number of people knowing that sometimes they would be over-worked and other times they would be redundant. From my point of view the job was a lifeline. This is why I can’t support Labour’s position now. Of course a job with certainty is better than a job without. But the latter is better than no job at all.
Julian Tisi there is a difference between what I, as a student, needed from a job and what I, as a working adult with aspirations to securing a mortgage and providing for a family, would need. That’s the whole point.. Zero hours contracts for jobs that would normally be permanent make it impossible to have the sort of security which make it possible to live a normal family life. It is literally living from day to day, week to week.
Talking about job cuts reminds me of the introduction of the minimum wage, fiercely opposed by business who said it was better to have a low paid job ‘than no job at all’. But of course we now know that was scare-mongering by vested interests.
Aren’t Lib Dems supposed to stand up for ordinary people against the powerful vested interests?
@expats – if you read the study you will see it was commissioned by the CIPD – not of their members.
@John Tilley – what point are you trying to make ?
Labour isn’t banning zero-hours contracts but restricting them: in this respect their mood music is much like the “immigration controls” mug- tough talk but actually very little action planned (let alone done).
In both cases I think the lack of action a good thing- and one that should be borne in mind in any coalition negotiations: we should make Labour negotiate on their (stated) plans rather than their rhetoric, rather than being tricked into “compromising” on what they were actually planning to do!
Simon McGrath 2nd Apr ’15 – 11:00am ……..@expats – if you read the study you will see it was commissioned by the CIPD – not of their members.
What it actually says is that “The survey is sampled from the CIPD membership and through the YouGov panel of HR professionals….
@expats – you havent read it properly. The parts on what people on zero hours contracts think of thjem coes fro a special you gov survey ( page 43 section 2)
“The CIPD has commissioned a twice-yearly survey among UK employees (including sole traders) to
identify their opinions and attitudestowards working life today. YouGov conducted the latest survey for the
CIPD of 2,918 UK employees in September 2013. This survey was administered to members of the YouGov plc panel of more than350,000 individuals who haveagreed to take part in surveys. The sample was selected and weighted
to be representative of the UK workforce in relation to sector andsize, by industry type and full-time/part-time working and by gender.Size of organisation was classified inthe following way: sole trader (onepersonbusiness), micro business”
There has always been labour on a casual basis; but what there has been in the last 2 decades have been a slow extension of casual / ‘zero-hours’ contracts into work that was previously contracted. The 2010 recession simply sped up something that was happening already.
Who have been a very significant culript? local authorities, desperately downsizing and outsourcing meals services, care homes, care workers, in response to the initiatives of successive governments of all shades.
Left-leaning local authorities who pledge to pay all their staff the living wage are only now able to do so because they have largely got rid of many low-paid employees who are now employed (usually on zero-hours contracts) by agencies on their behalf as subcontractors.
In such a case, we are not talking students; many such workers are older staff, grandfathers grandmothers, people who have done the job for many years but were told by their (state) employers they were not needed as they were too expensive.
This is what was done in response to what was called ‘tighening up on local government waste’ and ‘cutting red tape’ by all parties (including ourselves).
I believe that there are benefits to zero-hours contracts; the main one is you get some work if there is none. If I genuinely believed I had no other safe or viable option, of course I would work on a zero-hours contract – – but I would have to trust my employer. It would be interesting to know what nature of trade was done by the workers surveyed or if they believed there was other viable way of continuing doing the work they were doing.
Focusing on the benefits of a situation you did not choose and cannot control is one way of staying positive and keeping yourself motivated to keep in work; if could also class as being oppressed by conformity….
Today’s Evening Standard report is certainly worth a read:
Labour’s biggest union donor ‘used zero-hour contracts’
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/labours-biggest-union-donor-used-zerohour-contracts-10151441.html
@Simon “Labour’s biggest union donor ‘used zero-hour contracts’”
So are you telling us that Labour party policy is not driven by those who fund the party?
Surely it’s a good thing if he who pays the piper does not call the tune, and not necessarily something we could say about other parties.
So, you’re using an article in the Daily Mail to attack Labour? An article that was refuted by the House of Commons when they first published it 2 years ago. You do understand the difference between a ‘normal’ ZCH and an exploitative one, don’t you? And I’m sure you know why councils use ZHCs for some of their workers.
If you don’t, here’s a statement from Doncaster council: https://twitter.com/suttonnick/status/583296686325395456