It has always been possible for employers to hire "casual workers" and "piece workers" and in many industries it is essential that staff can be hired for a specific job such as fruit picking or clearing a backlog of filing or that staff can be hired for just a busy period. In the past these workers were always hired at particular times for particular jobs. This has changed, over the past 30 years there has been an increasing use of "Zero Hour Contracts" where casual workers are hired without any guarantee of when and for how long they will work.
So what has changed that has led to the use of the "Zero Hour Contract" rather than employing casual workers?
The primary motivation for employers is to have a workforce with "worker" status rather than "employee" status. The table below summarises the legal effect of worker status.
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| CIPD: Zero Hours Contracts: Understanding the Law |
Under employment law workers have far fewer rights than employees. If employers have workers then they are exempt from: Unfair dismissal, payslips, unfair conditions, Statutory Maternity Pay, Dependent Leave, Ante-Natal Care Leave, Trade Union Meetings at Work, TUPE, minimum notice, redundancy pay. In fact, by employing "workers" an employer can avoid most of the past 30 years of employment legislation.
The Zero Hour Contract creates a fiction that there is a loose relationship between employer and employed such that a worker is not an employee. However, in practice very many people who work under Zero Hour Contracts are indeed employees according to the law because they work long hours, are necessary to the operation of the business and it is obvious that if they refused work at a particular time they would cease to work for their employer. However, the law is couched in highly qualitative terms which means that a poor worker would be taking a huge risk by challenging a wealthy employer about employment status. Governments have connived in the fiction that all Zero Hour workers are simply workers rather than employees by neither making it an assumption that all Zero Hour workers are employees so that the burden of proof of status falls on employers nor providing any resources to support Zero Hour workers.
Zero Hour Contracts clearly suit some employers but are they good for workers? The literature on Zero Hour Contracts is full of platitudes such as "providing flexibility for workers" but I have not yet talked to anyone on a Zero Hour Contract who liked it, or even preferred it to casual working. The most corrosive effect of Zero Hour Contracts is that they remove a person's ability to budget. There is no guarantee that a worker can pay the rent or even afford food from one week to the next. The only people who can easily survive on Zero Hours Contracts are people in their twenties who live at home.
The most expensive employee in a particular area of work should really be the person who works at a moment's notice. Being "on-call" is widely accepted as damaging to a person's life and it should carry a large reward. Employers who wish to employ casual labour but who have variable work loads might employ a few full time staff who are "on-call" to fill in when there is high demand. The rest of the staff could be casual workers with defined hours.
If Governments (Labour and Tory) are conniving at the avoidance of employment legislation they should provide a better solution. One such solution might involve banning zero hour contracts and exempting casual work with defined hours from employment law.
See ww.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/sn06553.pdf
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