Unlike all you lefties on here who spout socialist values from your privileged ivory towers on your new mac book!!

Back to topic zero hour contracts are a very poor option, flexible labour is a much more positive way of addressing fluctuation in demand. Casual/agency work is no different, there are no guarantees, not sure why the likes of Mintball is not up in arms about this form of employment?

Casual or agency work is fundamentally different from zero hours contracts in one significant respect: the casual or agency worker is free to work for other employers or agencies.

I'm old enough to remember dockworkers pre-Devlin Report, when dock work was on a casual basis. Men were selected for a day's work from "The Pen". If they were not among the chosen ones, they didn't work and received no pay. They couldn't simply switch to another employer (there were over 1000 employers) for fear of being blacklisted. Corruption was rife, dockers were expected to pay for the beer of the gangers and foremen, it wasn't unusual for two men to physically fight over one available job for a day. All this happened right up to the mid-1960s, do we want to go back to that kind of savagery?

Zero hours contracts are masking the true state of employment/unemployment/underemployment in the UK. They may be advantageous to a small number of employees but in reality they allow employers to operate a labour force with no responsibility for sick-pay holiday-pay or maternity leave. Leaving business to reap the profits, offshore them to avoid tax and the taxpayer to pick up the slack.

One day you might attempt to engage with issues instead of simply flinging around old labels, which suggest that you don't really understand the current state of affairs in "the real world".



Because the two things are not one and the same.

I see flexible labour contracts in operation on every day of my working week in the various supermarkets that we deal with - while they use agencies and have no control over what contracts apply there (or more likely don't want to ask), in the main for their own staff they operate the 5/7 or 4/7 type shift regime where an employee has a guarantee of work and of their hours each week - a normal working contract in other words, the days of work can be switched at will but the hours are available and the shifts are part of the contract of employment.

That is flexible labour, not zero hour no commitment employers.


BTW, since last November my shift pattern, including standby weekend, has been 12/14, hence the reason why I have a massive backlog of holiday days to book before the end of the year, which probably won't be approved

I did temping and thoroughly enjoyed it. The difference is I had a mortgage to pay and only accepted temping work that was for more than a week at a time instead of a day here, a day off there which is how zero hours could work out at. I also made sure when an assignment was coming to an end, I had something lined up for the following day/week, by which ever agency. (I was registered with a few). Temping is also a way into permanent work.

As it happens, I don't own anything made by Apple.
But that's not really the issue ... you too are using the Louise Mensch argument, when she sweepingly included anyone who bought a coffee at Starbucks as "buying into everything capitalism provides" whilst at the same time protesting in St Paul's Churchyard as being hypocritical.
That's what we call polarised thinking, Sal.

If someone says that they are opposed to some issue of the capitalist world, they are (in your view, it seems) automatically a raving communist.
It doesn't work like that, there's a whole range of positions between the two extremes, and objecting to aspects of laissez-faire neoliberal economics does not make one a Stalinist.

Just to demonstrate the utter vacuousness of polarised thinking .. do you own anything made in China? ... it is, after all, still a Communist country and has built-up enormous reserves that unbalance the world's markets and balance of payments.
Surely a committed laissez-faire capitalist like you wouldn't buy into that?


If I may apply your style of polarisation to that comment, do you think, therefore, that everyone should be on zero-hours contracts ... and, if not, why not?
By the way, agency work varies quite widely, I personally worked as a self-employed contractor for 15 years, never once on a zero-hours contract, the contracts always included agreed likely length of contract, notice periods, hours per week, times of hours etc etc.

rlMcDonalds has "82,800 contracted staff not guaranteed work or a stable income."rl

They're lovin' it? I doubt it.

“[iThe zero-hours contracts which all our hourly-paid employees are on do not affect employee benefit entitlement and all of our employees are entitled to a range of benefits including life assurance, employee discounts and access to a range of training and qualifications.”[/i

No mention of sick pay, holidays, notice period, protection from unfair dismissal etc etc.
It could just a bad PR release but, basically, no mention of ANY employment rights at all.

I am sure its quite deliberate.

You'd think McDonalds managements reliance on zero hours contracts was possibly because they are just too incompetent to work out a staff rota for a business that must have a pretty predictable level of demand. It should be pretty easy for them to work out a base level of demand in each outlet, employ a core number of permanent staff to cover it and then employ temporary staff to cover any seasonal peaks.

However I doubt they are at all remotely incompetent and have worked out it is simply more profitable to employ staff on zero hours precisely because they don't have to provide sick pay, holiday pay or redundancy pay. They can also probably pay less per hour as well. A permanent employee would no doubt be looking for jobs paying more then the minimum wage whereas someone desperate for a few hours beholden to their employer will work for less.

It's not flexibility the likes of McDondald's and the IOD champion zero hours contracts for. It's because they cost less and result in larger profits at least in the short term (as usual ignoring long term planning and ignoring the benefits of a stable and contented workforce). It is just another expression of maximising shareholder return and hang the consequences. It's also a fine illustration of what unregulated capitalism leads to. Pretty much in the same way large companies have worked out they can avoid corporation tax this is just another wheeze dreamt up in the same vein to allow companies to dodge their financial and moral obligations.

I read that the EU was peed off at US corporations attempting to import US labour practises into the EU. High time Brussels told them (and all EU employers): you want to operate in the EU? You play by EU laws or not at all.

Brussels could then issue a warning to all member countries: Sort out the problem with zero-hours contracts or we'll do it for you.

That should get things stirred up

Where are the Labour Party in all this? More or less silent. This is the sort of thing the Labour Party was founded to fight against. These days they are pathetic.

Where is the narrative to counteract the villification of the poor and disabled "scroungers"? What I'd be doing is runnning a hard-hitting TV campaign contrasting decent poor / disabled people struggling to survive on a few quid a week with arrogant teenage public school boys at Eton or similar - all dressed up and sneering at the oiks (would easy be able to get candid footage). Then I'd point out the amount of taxpayer the scroungers get at many public schools by virtue of charitable status (in some cases granted centruries ago when they were for the benefit of the poor). I'd then go onto to say we need a modern, competitive labour force to win in the global race and that currently Boards of many companies and national institutions are made up primarily of public school eduated types. I would point out that in any competitive field of endeavour (eg football) those types no longer dominate and that the "sense of entitlement" of these people (including many expense fiddlers in Westmimster, fat cat bankers, etc) are holding our great nation back. The only way to compete in the global race will be to create a new type of leader - one fit for the 21st century and not one based on their parents' ability to pay for privilege. With this in mind, for the sake of the nation, we will need regrettably to close all public schools and convert them to community hospitals for the benefit of the all and also perhaps remove access to inherited wealth. That way each new generation would be hungry and competitive in the great global race.

As I keep saying part of the reason why zero hours or short-hour contracts have come about is due to the stealth tax of employers NI - Labour had a part in whacking that up. Much better, IMO< to abolish it and increase corporation tax to comepenstate. That way companies would have a greater incentive to emplo people full-time and securely, the big, profitable corporations would get tax relief on the wages anyway and marginally profitable companies would be able to employ people without the 13.5% additional costs of so doing. What stops this? Politicians - massaging the employment figures in effect.

There is nothing stealthy about employers NI, the information is widely available, employers NI should taper upwards rather than there being a fixed starting point, that only encourages employers to use part time workers to fulfill what should be full time roles.

Corporation tax is avoidable, see Google, Dell, Tesco and many others for details.