Zero-hours contracts are a tyranny that must end now
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http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2015/apr/26/zero-hours-contracts-tyranny-for-workers Version 0 of 1. Barbara Ellen (“Zero-hours jobs stink – whatever you call them”, Comment) powerfully exposes the tyranny of zero-hours contracts, highlighting the Orwellian descriptions now favoured by Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey. The Tory promise to outlaw the use of exclusive zero-hours contracts is welcome but fails to remove the pay and job insecurity that characterise their use. Labour displays a more robust approach by proposing that anyone working “regular hours for more than 12 weeks will have a right to a regular contract”. As such, the possibility is still left open to an employer to sack someone at the 11th week of a contract. Labour also unequivocally state that they will “ban exploitative zero-hours contracts”. Emphatically right. Michael Somerton Hull Who is doing the flexing and who is being flexed? “Flexibility” is an ambiguous word exploited to disguise two totally different situations. Yes, there are cases when an employee can choose their hours around other demands on their time such as children or studies. This sort of option is often available to professional specialists who can dictate their own terms. However, this situation should not be confused with zero-hours workers who have no control over their weekly incomes. They have to bend over backwards to accommodate the employer’s varying demands, sometimes due to the market but often due to lack of planning. These workers cannot conceive of taking on a mortgage and they struggle to commit to paying monthly rent, because no one will commit to them. Posted online Freedom of movement has been used by free-market capitalism to undercut wages in this country by recruiting from abroad. But freedom of movement does not cause wages to be undercut – this is, rather, a choice on the part of employers, who can either pay a decent wage that local workers can actually live on or a minimum wage that only will have value when sent as remittances abroad. If the current and previous governments had done more to enforce employers’ paying a living wage, open wage-undercutting would not have been as severe (illegal undercutting would of course occur but again adequate enforcement and penalisation could deal with this problem). Posted online Barbara Ellen addresses the use of Orwellian newspeak in our time but failed to hit on the most accurate (ie not Orwellian) sobriquet for this vile invention: zero-hours contracts are truly “part-time unemployment”. Jim Grove Cowbridge Vale of Glamorgan |