The TUC's stance on zero-hours contracts is stuck in the past – a ban is bad for everyone

Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), has written an impassioned piece in today’s Times, outlining why so-called ‘zero-hours contracts’ should be banned. The arguments are not new, with Labour regularly politicising this issue in recent election campaigns.


O’Grady is no Arthur Scargill or Bob Crow. She is decent, genuine and capable of voicing her opinions in a manner that is at least palatable to a broad swathe of political opinion. Her piece rightly highlights the vital industries many such workers operate in, and stresses that they should be valued and appreciated. Her assertion that “they are not being shown much love in return” is valid, but all parties in these arrangements know that there isn’t much love involved. It’s more a no-strings, open relationship.

O’Grady’s objection, ultimately, comes from the flawed and old-fashioned view held by too many trade unions when it comes to the employer/employee relationship. Running throughout her piece is the clear sense of villainous businesses and victimised, helpless workers. “Unions,” she writes, “have always campaigned for and negotiated greater flexibility for workers. But let’s be crystal clear: when it comes to zero-hours contracts and
many other forms of insecure work everything is stacked in favour of employers.”
This is simply untrue. Yes, she makes a powerful and emotive case about the apparent evils of zero-hours working. Dismissing the apparent benefit of greater flexibility, she writes: “But try telling that to a care worker who doesn’t know whether they’ll have work from one day to the next and has to stay glued to their phone
for updates. Try telling that to working mums and dads when they have to rearrange childcare at a moment’s notice.” In citing such examples, she is using the people for whom casual work is unsuitable to criticise the concept. If you have a mortgage to pay and young mouths to feed, they’re probably not the thing for you. Yet any working pattern works for some and not for others. That is why people work full-time, part-time, for themselves on a freelance basis and yes, in casual, zero-hours arrangements. The October-December 2017 Labour Force survey (LFS) found, for example, that 36% of those on a zero-hours contract were aged 16-24, compared with just 11.4% of those not employed on a zero-hours basis. It also found that 18.7% of those employed on a zero-hours contract were in full-time education, compared with a mere 2.3% of those not on such a contract. For someone looking to gain work experience, or earn a living despite having a variable capacity to work due to commitments such as study, zero-hours contracts are an ideal solution. This is also true because, as O’Grady fails to mention, a worker is under no obligation to accept the work. An employer is vulnerable to legal challenge if, in practice, that is demonstrably not the case.

Zero-hours contracts have been demonised because they have an iffy history. It used to be the case that employers could slap exclusivity clauses on their workers, offering them no guarantees of work but forbidding them from working for anyone else. That is no longer the case, and it is this freedom to work elsewhere that helps explain why there are more zero-hours contracts than zero-hours workers. Indeed, despite much being made by Labour and the TUC of the insecurity that these contracts bring, the LFS found that a mere 25.3% of 0-hours workers wanted more hours (mostly from their current job), with the average number of hours worked per week by a zero-hours worker being a pretty decent 25.2.
Proposals to allow workers to request guarantees are not meaningless, as O’Grady claims, but give further bargaining power to the workers. Not every employer treats their casual workers well, but neither do they necessarily treat more permanent staff well either. That’s no reason to ban this type of contractual arrangement. We will, of course, see further evolution of the so-called ‘gig economy.’ There are fights being had over the worker versus employee debate, and the perhaps more pressing question of self-employed versus worker status in different contexts. The bottom line is that things are becoming less and less clear, and far less black and white. Increased flexibility in how we work brings new challenges and new opportunities, both for businesses and employees. Unfortunately, the TUC’s stance on zero-hours contracts is stuck in the past – a ban is bad for everyone.