Tag Archives: precarious work

Zero future for zero hours in a fair economy?

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By Stacey Dingwall

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has released its second annual update on the number of people employed on zero hours contracts, which suggests that in August 2014 UK firms were employing 1.8 million people on such contracts.

What is a zero hours contract?

According to Acas, the term ‘zero hour contract’ (although not defined in legislation) can be understood as “an employment contract between an employer and a worker, which means the employer is not obliged to provide the worker with any minimum working hours, and the worker is not obliged to accept any of the hours offered”.

Use of the contracts has been a highly controversial issue in recent months, with high-profile retailers such as Sports Direct (who employ 90% of their part time staff on zero hours contracts) coming in for criticism of their “exploitation” of their employees. The sports retailer is also facing legal action from hundreds of their workers due to their exclusion from the company bonus scheme, thanks to the nature of their contracts.

Increasing or not?

The ONS’ first Analysis of Employee Contracts that do not Guarantee a Minimum Number of Hours found that between January and February 2014, 1.4 million UK workers were employed on zero hours contracts. Despite the inevitable headlines depicting the new figure as a direct increase from the 2014 analysis, the ONS was careful to warn against this in its latest analysis, noting that it covers a different time of year than the first release therefore the number of contracts reported may be affected by seasonal factors.

The latest release also includes data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), which indicates that the number of people employed on zero hours contracts in their main employment, between October and December 2014, was 697,000 or 2.3% of all people in employment. The figure for the same period the year before was 586,000 or 1.9% of people in employment although again, the ONS are careful to stipulate that they can’t be certain how much of this ‘increase’ is due to greater recognition of what constitutes a zero hours contract, as opposed to new contracts.

The Economic Research Council suggested that a lot of the jobs that have been created recently have come with much less security and guaranteed pay. And the UK Commission for Employment and Skills have noted that 33% of people on zero hour contracts would like to work more hours (either in their current job or in a different one), compared to just 13% of people not on a zero hour contract.

Zero hours and the general election

The issue of the use of zero hours contracts looks set to become a key feature of parties’ campaigns in the upcoming general election. Current Secretary of Business, Innovation and Skills – Liberal Democrat Vince Cable – has already put forward legislation (clause 151 of the Small Business Enterprise and Employment Bill, currently before the House of Lords) which would see exclusivity clauses in contracts (which prevent those employed on zero hours contracts from seeking additional work to supplement their income) banned.

The Conservative Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has however defended the contracts, arguing that they “provide people with a flexible way of working and the freedom to arrange jobs around other commitments” and “allow employers to be competitive in response to market trends”.

What of the other parties? Labour has vowed to “end exploitative zero hours contracts” and introduce “new rights” to employees on such contracts, however has stopped short of proposing to ban employers from offering them altogether. Somewhat embarrassingly for the party, figures released by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) and seized on by the tabloids, have indicated that over 30 Labour MPs employed staff on zero hours contracts in 2014.

The Green Party is firmly against the use of zero hours contracts altogether: leader Natalie Bennett has been calling on the government to place an outright ban on them since 2013. UKIP leader Nigel Farage has also criticised the long-term use of zero hours contracts by employers, and has called for large employers to be subject to a code of conduct as to how they are applied.

Zero hours contracts aren’t a financial necessity

In these times of budget cuts, many local authorities have argued that they have no choice but to offer some of their workers zero hours contracts. One area in which this has been particularly prevalent is in the provision of social care, with some employees paid on a ‘time and task’ basis, i.e. only for the amount of time they actually spend with a client, which can be as little as 15 minutes in some cases.

In 2012, Southwark Council took the decision to move away from this approach, after feedback from care workers and service users indicated that it did not allow workers to carry out their duties with the required level of compassion. The Council carried out a review of their homecare services and found that extending the length of visits greatly helped in keeping service users healthy in their own homes and out of hospital and residential care. It also noted that the costs of providing longer visits had been ‘passed on’ to their care workforce over time through the use of zero hours contracts and, wishing to end this, announced that from October 2014 they would be eliminating their use altogether, and offering guaranteed hours of employment to their staff.

Immediate reaction to the release of the latest figures has been plentiful; it now remains to be seen whether it is reflected in party campaigns in the forthcoming general election.

The Idox Information Service has a wealth of research reports, articles and case studies on zero hours contracts and other employment issues. Items of interest include:

The decent jobs deficit: the human cost of zero-hours working in the UK

Give and take? Unravelling the true nature of zero-hours contracts

Zero hours contract: not all bad news

Zero-hours contracts: myth and reality

Flexibility or insecurity? Exploring the rise in zero hours contracts

Spreading the word on the living wage

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By James Carson

Last week, Church of England bishops issued a letter calling for a new direction that they believe political life in the UK ought to take. Among the bishops’ recommendations was support for the living wage:

“It represents the basic principle that people are not commodities and that their lives cannot adapt infinitely in response to market pressures.”

It didn’t take long for the media to find flaws in the Church’s own approach to paying its staff. This week it was reported that a Church job in Canterbury was being advertised at £6.70 per hour. The living wage, calculated from the basic cost of UK life, is currently £7.85 an hour outside London.

Low pay seems likely to be one of the key issues in the general election campaign, so a new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) is especially timely.

Low pay is endemic

The report describes low pay as “endemic” in the UK labour market, noting that more than one in five workers in the UK experience low pay, a proportion that has changed little in more than 25 years.

Among the research findings:

  • More than a third of low-paid workers (38.4%) experience a period of worklessness over a four year period;
  • Being low paid increases the probability of experiencing a period of worklessness by around 10%, after accounting for a host of individual, family-level and employment characteristics;
  • Those low-paid workers on temporary contracts, and those with work-limiting health conditions or disabilities, are the most likely to experience a spell of worklessness over a four-year period.

The authors of the report express concern that when many of those workless individuals who were formerly low paid return to employment, it is to a similarly low level of earnings.

“This low-pay, no-pay cycle means many find it difficult to escape low living standards and advance in the world of work.”

In addition, the JRF report highlights  the significant burden on the state of having large numbers of low-paid workers alternating between employment and worklessness, and suggests that significant fiscal savings could be made if job security for those in low-paid positions was strengthened.

While the paper does not propose any specific policy recommendations to tackle the employment insecurity of low-paid work, the authors suggest that several areas of policy offer potential for co-ordinated solutions to this problem, including:

  • extending access to skills and training to those who are in work and lack qualifications;
  • limiting the burden of unplanned absence from work to employers through the targeted re-introduction of schemes such as statutory sick pay recovery;
  • providing support alongside incentives for low-paid workers to progress through in-work conditionality within Universal Credit.

The movement to encourage more employers to pay the living wage has picked up pace in recent months. Organisations such as Citizens UK and the Living Wage Foundation have campaigned to encourage more employers to pay the living wage. Even so, by the end of 2014, only 60,000 people in the UK were covered by this pay rise, with none of the big supermarkets or large care firms involved. Some local authorities, however, including Glasgow, Cardiff, Birmingham, Newcastle and the Greater London Authority, have adopted the living wage.

As the JRF report underlines, paying the living wage to employees results in reduced welfare benefits and extra taxes. Which means that, whether the employer is Tesco or the Archbishop of Canterbury, the living wage can give people basic rights and a sense of dignity in work, while making good economic sense for the nation’s coffers.

Further Reading

We’ve previosuly blogged on the living wage and addressing the causes of in-work poverty.

Other resources which you may find interesting (some may only be available to Idox Information Service members):

Wealth: having it all and wanting more

The benefits of tackling worklessness and low pay

Ten years of the GLA’s London Living Wage

Bare minimum is not enough (living wage)

Low pay Britain 2014