As pointed out previously, zero hour contracts may suit some people at some stages of their life, but for most they are a disaster and its noticeable how most of them involve pay rates at or close to the national minimum wage.

There is only one thing worse than doing a job on national minimum wage and that is doing a job on national minimum wage when you don't know how many hours or shifts you'll be allocated next week, or later on this week, or tomorrow, or at all.

But it gets even worse than that when you want to try and find somewhere to live for which mortgage company or even private landlord is going to take a punt on you when you have no clue what your wage will be next week and all the evidence in your pay packets simply proves is that your take home pay is at the whim of your boss or agency.

Credit for anything, forget it, need a car to get to that zero hour contract but can't afford to pay outright for it, forget it, or be prepared to pay the top rates of interest for even meagre loans from reputable lenders come at an interest premium when your wage is not guaranteed and/or reliant on bonus or overtime - you never get the advertised rate on loans when you're on limited or zero hours contract.

The current campaign movement is towards havign one day when immigrant workers withdraw their labour to prove how much society depends upon them - what might be even more powerful is for anyone on less than 10 hour a week contracts to withdraw their labour for one week - they won't even notice the loss in income, but the rest of us will notice their non attendance.

Yep. Plus the increasing trend toward being phoned up on the day by the agency and told where you'll be going that day. Often not in the same city with wildly differing hours.
No contracted hours. No certainty of location. No certainty of benefit eligibility.

But we need [imore[/i deregulation – that's what will get the economy going again!

Except that many employees won't dare to.
They don't have much in the way of employment law to protect them and will be afraid of being summarily sacked ... divide and rule works very well where there is no union to organise the protest.

It looks like 38 Degrees have Sports Direct in their sights now. They've achieved some decent results with their campaigns, most recently defeating Hunt over Lewisham Hospital A&E.

If a senior manager or director of any private business was placed in charge of important flagship projects which then crumbled and failed at the first challenge then they would have their authority severely undermined and their position in the company would be in jeopardy.

The number of flagship policy projects that have failed at the first challenge under this current government is impressive in its "make it up on the fly" and "rush it through before 2015 is upon us" stylee.

And yet they keep their positions, shrug their shoulders and press on with the next doctrine as if none of this matters.

It's hardly been just them, but a massive grassroots campaign locally. Very, very effective.

Didn't say it was just them. They did collect from donors to pay the legal team that successfully challenged Hunt though.

rlAnd another one – this time, sacking staff and reemploying them on worse terms, including zero-hours contractsrl.

What issue, zero contract hours have been around years, they just now have this pithy little name. 20 years ago I worked part time in a pub, I can still remember the phone calls asking me to come in with barely any notice or telling me not to bother as there was no-one in the bar. Then again I may have been the only person in the country to have this arrangement.

It's heartbreaking that the bloke from Cineworld has "real difficulties" with this kind of job, yet he's made it last for 4 years. Hmmm.

Personally, I'm slightly more concerned by companies like Apple who use companies that employ children in the Far East to build their computers so people in the West are now able, through blogs/Twitter/etc, to get all morally indignant about the plight of workers in their own countries.

Comparing part time casual bar work to a job that is supposed to be your full time and main source of income, the one that your whole employment and financial credibility is going to be based on but can't be because there is nothing for those credit agencies to base your earnings upon, is just...

stupid.

Why? It gave me what little money I needed to have some sort of life while at college. The terms meant I was at their beck and call. The very definition of a "zero hour contract".
Of the 250,000 people trapped in the life threatening cycle, that offers them no hope, how many are just after a bit of spare cash? how many are using it as their main source of income? how many are actually that ed off with it? how many are perfectly happy with the arrangement? how many actually go that extra yard to get the hours on the rota? if this awful way of working was suddenly abolished, of the 250,000, how many would be offered full time work?
Still, lets just stick with "zero hour contracts, they're just so unfair...waaaahhhhh"

You've answered your own question in your little foot-stomp.

You were using it to make a bit of pocket money while you were at college and if you've read any of this thread you'll understand that that aspect of it is well understood by most.

The fact that I used to work the bars at Leeds CF&A once a fortnight at home games never once crossed my mind when I applied for a mortgage at Northern rock, nor did the thought that working part time behind a bar for a bit of pocket money would qualify me for a mortgage or even a rental application.

The whole point, that you have spectacularly missed, is that zero hour contracts are of no use to anyone who lives outside of the student-part-time-pocket-money sector, for when those students leave university clutching their brand new degrees in hand with their £40,000 student loan debt, then what they don't need, at the age of 21 or 22, is an employer who offers them a job on NMW with no guarantee of any shifts or payment at the end of any given week.

That newly fledged highly qualified student will not be able to take their employment contract or their last three months wage slips to any building society or letting agency and prove with any confidence that they have a regular income, for the truth is that they don't.

Now do you see why your previous comment was stupid ?

If they've been offered a job at NMW with no guarantees, then their student loan debt is irrelevent. Unless they're somehow pulling in over 21000k a year.

Lets have the numbers then? You do know, don't you?
Is everyone one on a zero hour contract living with parents? under a bridge? in their car in sports direct car park?

No, most will be entitled to Working Tax Credits, if they have children they will be entitled to Child Tax Credits, there is even an inducement there for both employee and employer to NOT pay contracted hours, thats how mad the system is, it favours both employer and employee to work the contract to maximise the benefit claim to the employee, and in doing so lowers the payroll cost to the employer (not to mention the reduced NIS tax) - the tax payer is both subsidising and encouraging the private sector to play the system and whilst there would appear to be no downside (unemployment, though high, is not as high as the so called "experts" believe it should be, they just haven't seen this type of capitalism before) there is - its just not become apparent yet.

It hasn't become apparent because the past five years have been very static years, the buying/selling house market declined rapidly and stayed flat, is still very flat, people are hesitant to move jobs or move house, everyone is marking time waiting for the boom years to return and zero or 16 hour contracts are a way in which they can hold their ground - until things get better.

The downside will not affect me, I have a house, I have paid off the bulk of the mortgage, if I sold tomorrow I have enough equity to buy something else, some thing smaller, but I won't have to live in my car - I only got here though because in 1981 the Northern Rock Building Society took a look at my employment record, my salary level, and got a letter from my employer to say I was in permanent full time employment and we need that cycle to keep on running, we need first time buyers coming in on the ground floor and they have been severely curtailed in the past five years and will continue to be severely curtailed by contracts of employment that show no commitment from the employer or pay slips that show a fluctuating insecure level of hours and a reference from an employer that tells the lender that this employee does not have a permanent job in accordance with the lenders definition of permanent.

Thats the downside and the job market will continue like this for years to come, once an employer uses agency or no-committed hours contracts AND uses the taxpayer to underwrite his payroll costs then it will take draconian legislation to reverse the trend.

Variable low or no hours contracts give individuals no future stake in anything but a dependence on tax credits.