It is time to legislate against exploitative zero hour contracts

Zero hour contracts are often used by students in need of flexible working hours. In theory, this means that we can work when we want and for as long as we want, giving students breaks for assignments and trips home for the weekend, and allowing for flexibility in the workplace – theory and practice, however, are two very different things.

The reality for these students, and others trapped in these contracts, is that they are far too often offered too few hours or are sent home early, leaving them with an unstable income as hours can vary from five to twenty-five, depending on the week. Having been employed on three different zero hour contracts, I have experienced this first hand. My first contract, at a football club, involved seven hour shifts, and with around two matches per month, I could easily estimate my monthly income and plan accordingly.

Having been employed on three different zero hour contracts, I have experienced this first hand

By contrast the other two, which were in the hospitality sector, were unsurprisingly awful. The very last adjective I would use to describe my contracts would be ‘flexible’. Throughout my employment, I never had a stable income, and could be sent home only two hours into a nine-hour shift for no reason other than the workplaces being overstaffed. This meant, for me and for other members of staff employed on zero hours contracts, income security was non-existent. Luckily for me, I am a middle-class student, so my unstable income was not the end of the world. Yet the unseen side of zero hours contracts is not just an irritating part of a hard-working journey towards a high-paid graduate career. It is an unstable lifestyle with that denies people a wage to live on.

My personal encounters with colleagues match the statistics. I have met people struggling to pay their bills and their rent because of their fluctuating income, and couldn’t even hope to budget as every month brought with it a totally different salary. A recent survey by the ONS showed that 26.6% of people employed in a zero hours contract wanted more hours, compared to 7.2% of the rest of the population. This demonstrates that zero hours contracts are leaving people without the hours they want, and more importantly without the hours they need.

Zero hours contracts are a disguise for wider issues in our society, as they hide the unemployment rate and the rates of in-work poverty behind a rhetoric of giving employees flexible work. The organisation JRF has stated that ‘the continued rise in employment is no longer reducing poverty’, and one of the many reasons for this truth is the exploitation occurring through zero hours contracts.

I have met people struggling to pay their bills and their rent because of their fluctuating income

Across the country, the average hours a person on such a contract works is 26 per week, so why not give these people contracts allowing them to work these hours consistently? Most people I have met work a similar number of hours per week, but this can change suddenly, leaving people without money for a month and with no baseline salary to rely on. This doesn’t scream flexibility or freedom to me, but rather exploitation and bad management.

What we need to see is widespread change in employment patterns, and a shift to a system in which part-time workers are offered a secured number of hours per week, rather than businesses overstaffing themselves with zero-hour staff. Whilst these contracts are artificially increasing the employment rate, they are not genuinely better for the economy, and serve only to facilitate exploitation in the workplace and hide bad management. If change does not come soon, then maybe it will be time to finally legislate against these manipulative contracts. If paying for rent, bills and other necessary supplies cannot be flexible, then neither should people’s incomes and hours.