I’m Not Lovin’ It: Zero Hour Contracts
With the McStrikes bringing zero hour contracts back into the news, can UK buisness kick its no-work-guaranteed habit? With rampant in-work poverty plaguing the nation, we can only hope so.
UK Politics
Sophie Savage
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The fight for workers’ rights has been a long and arduous battle over the last few centuries. In the past month, McDonald’s workers’ in Crayford and Cambridge have continued this fight by staging the first ever McDonald’s strikes in the UK. Amongst the issues that sparked the action is the use of zero hour contracts by the fast food chain.
In August 2017 Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party Leader, threw his support behind the workers. In a statement released to his Facebook profile he stated: ‘I support McDonald’s workers who have balloted to strike for the first time in the UK.’, also adding that ‘zero hour contracts are a symptom of Tory Britain.’
McDonald’s workers are not alone in their struggle. The Office of National Statistics’ latest report on the subject shows that 1.7 million contracts in the UK were zero-hour contracts, meaning they give no guranteed working hours. This accounts for 6% of all employment contracts in the UK — a figure that stands to illustrate the breadth of the problem.
Despite attempted justifications from politicians such a Jacob Rees Mogg, Conservative MP for North East Somerset, the harm caused by zero hour contracts is indefensible. One in three people on a zero hour contract are reported as wanting more hours — this is over three times more than people in employment contracts with guaranteed hours. These statistics help to provide an explanation of the UK’s in-work poverty problem, as steady hours and a reliable income are not synonymous with employment when zero hour contracts exist.
With Cardiff University finding that 60% of those in poverty are in a household where someone works, it’s not difficult to see that zero hour contracts provide a structural basis for employment that fosters poverty. Despite being in work, it is arguable that workers cannot get the hours they need to support themselves because their employers, foisted by zero hour contracts, have no legal obligation to provide them with these hours. This argument has been stated by Katie Schmuecker, Policy and Research Manager at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation — a leading UK charity focusing on poverty. In 2014 she stated: ‘Zero-hours contracts are just one aspect of the UK’s problem with in-work poverty. We have workers unable to get enough hours to lift themselves and their families out of poverty’.
Whilst her point was salient in 2014, in 2017 it has become even more crucial. Figures released by the ONS show that there has been a steady increase in employment on a zero hour contract from 2014 to 2017 — this paired with record levels of in-work poverty clearly point to zero-hour contracts playing a role in the UK’s poverty problem. This point is further illustrated by their association with homelessness and a 2014 commision on poverty calling for their termination.
The problematic nature of zero hour contracts is only further exacerbated by their potential for exploitation by bosses with a grudge. Think about toeing the line of poverty, with the only hope of keeping your head above water being a zero hour contract and, per its nature, the hours your boss will give to you week to week. Say you have to pass up hours one week, or you have a personal issue with the person who assigns hours. The lack of a formally binding agreement saying the you’re entitled to be give X amount of hours to work now means that your livihood, your ability to put food on the table, is at the whim of one person who decides who gets what hours and when. Imagine the vulnerability, the imbalance of power and the exploitation. That is what zero hour contracts facilitate — forget the distant cries of ‘flexibility’ and remember how it would feel to have your life hang in the balance.
The Prime Minister, Theresa May, may believe that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, but for many, this could not be further from the truth. And as long as the government continues to support zero-hour contracts, they continue to condemn 7 million Britons to impoverishment. Until the government and businesses begin to address the harm caused by these contracts, employment may only present a dead end, rather than a solution to hardship.
