John Pearson denounces Zero Hours Contracts.
Zero Hours Contract … Me? Since retiring I have been taken back into the fold by my former bosses, realising that over recent years they have laid off everybody they once employed who knew what to do and how to do it! I was ‘head hunted’, I like to think … ‘A sucker,’ as my wife sees it. Whilst I do have a minimum number of paid hours most weeks (6), a luxury denied to true Zero Hours employees, I am at the mercy of these same bosses as to any additional time I am required to work. Some weeks it may be no extra hours, some weeks 4, 6 or 10. A colleague of mine, brought back in similar circumstances, regards our working lives as very precarious, and in that way we have something in common with the genuine Zero Hours folk. In our case, in addition to our official hours there seems to be an unspoken expectation that we will ‘help out’ with various tasks for no additional pay. It is wrongly presumed by full time colleagues that we are ‘around’ all the time, and can be called upon, usually at short notice, to help them address their emergencies.
Whilst I have my pension and do not have to work to make ends meet, I do have some understanding of the hand-to-mouth lives led by those who depend entirely on Zero Hours Contracts. Such persons have no guarantee of fixed working hours in any given week. Thus, they have no guarantee of a particular level of income, something which can range from a good living wage in one week to literally zero in the next. How can such employees achieve any real stability in their lives and those of any dependants? Without the promise of regular minimum earnings how can they meet regular outgoings for food and accommodation? What hope have they of regular savings … even less of funding a mortgage so as to enter the home-owning market? I fear that having and providing for a family must be either an unattainable dream or, for those actually struggling to do so, a living nightmare.
For many (up to 900,000 persons in 2016, 2.9% of the working population), working in situations only offering Zero Hours Contracts is their only source of income. Here, employers are not bound to provide work and pay at all. 30% of employees, it is said, would prefer more hours than they are given. Equally, whilst the employee does not have to accept any particular work session and cannot be made to work more than 48 hours in any week, who can afford to bite the hand that only irregularly feeds them? Such is the power their employers have over them. These workers may not necessarily be entitled to annual leave. Those paid less than £5772 per annum have no entitlement to pension credits. What of Sick Pay or a company pension scheme?? All these are an automatic part of the package for those on proper, more traditional, contracts of employment.
The Hotel and Restaurant sector engage up to 19% of their employees on Zero Hours Contracts, the Health sector 13% and Education 10%. Major employers claim that this meets their essential needs for a flexible workforce. 80% of Wetherspoons staff and 90% at both Sports Direct and McDonalds have to work like this. It is reported that even Buckingham Palace employs some of its staff on this basis.
Zero Hours employees are unlikely to have any real say in the management of their time or, more generally, the structure of their workplace or their own ways of working. They are entirely at the mercy of their employer. These latter-day wage slaves can have little hope of a promotion, even less of a long-term career progression.
Those of us who, in the main, have enjoyed the reliability and rewards of secure, uninterrupted working lives for thirty to forty years, culminating for most of us in a pension-cushioned retirement, should be concerned at a society which allows such employment practices as the Zero Hours Contract. We should lobby any Government of whatever complexion which sanctions such a precarious, soul-destroying existence for the 900,000 or more who work hard and deserve something better.