A Brief History of Politicians Promising to End Zero Hours Contracts

Zero hours contracts seem to have been weapon of choice for big nasty corporations in their battle to extract as much possible value from their underdog workers.

Allowing companies to employ people with absolutely no guarantee of any hours – and therefore pay – whatsoever, means workers are often expected to be on-call for the employer seven days a week. The contracts seem rife with opportunities for exploitation: they mean no sick pay or benefits, no financial stability, and create problems for workers who have other responsibilities such as child care that they can‘t be flexible about. Obviously, because they are shit and the world is shit and things will always get more shit, they‘re on the rise, with a 21 percent increase since last year alone.

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Paradoxically though, zero hours contracts have been a hot topic in politics over the past few years, with numerous politicians seemingly coming out in defence of the worker and claiming to want to fix the issue. Then not much gets done to fix it.

So let‘s take a look at the politicians who have jumped on this particular bandwagon, spouted a bunch of sympathetic rhetoric, and hopped off right before decision-making-town.

1995: Tony Blair definitively pledges an end to zero hours contracts over two decades ago

In the second ever speech to the Labour Party conference as leader, Tony Blair pledges that “part-time employees will no longer be treated as second-class citizens. There will be an end to zero-hours contracts .”

Which obviously never happened.

2013: Vince Cable asked by George Osborne to look into it, and kind of does

In statistical terms, if someone is reported to have worked just one hour a week they are still technically “employed“. This meant that zero-hours contracts helped the UK to appear to be recovering from economic difficulty in some suspiciously good 2012 unemployment figures. In 2013 though, other surveys revealed that a lot of “employed“people were only employed in the sense that they were on somebody ‘s books, with estimates that zero hours contracts could actually be three times higher than officially reported.

Significantly, a high proportion of NHS nurses and other healthcare staff were reported to be employed under zero hours contracts, probably as a result of increasing privatisation of the NHS and the ruthless cost-cutting that that inevitably engenders.

In response to new figures, Osborne says vaguely that zero hours contracts “need to be used in the proper way “, and orders Vince Cable to conduct a review. The shadow business secretary at the time, Chuka Umunna, says that given the scale of the problem, the lack of formality to Cable‘s little review shows his efforts up as “entirely inadequate“.

But it adequately made it look like the government was doing something about the problem.

2014: Ed Miliband calls contracts “Victorian” as his own MPs use them

Pointing to Sports Direct as a “bad place to work“ because of its use of zero hours contracts, Miliband promises in future government to give more rights to workers, including compensation for last-minute cancelled shifts. Awkwardly, Labour MPs were called out for using zero hours contracts for their own staff.

2015: During their election campaigns, all parties pledge to change zero hours contracts

During a difficult grilling by Jeremy Paxman, Cameron gets hot under the collar and admits he couldn’t live on a zero hours contract. Later, Osborne comes out to save his pal and says that neither could he. Literally no one in the UK is shocked about that. The Tory election campaign then states that “in a Britain that everyone is proud to call home, people are employed, they are not used. Those exclusive zero hours contracts that left people unable to build decent lives for themselves – we will scrap them.“

Miliband one-ups them both and calls zero hours contracts an exploitative “epidemic“. He then promises that in his government, after 12 weeks of regular work, people will have legal rights to a proper contract.

In May, the Tories fulfil their promise to legislate against exclusivity clauses in zero hours contracts, which previously allowed companies to demand that their workers only work for them, even if they are offering them no hours. The law goes no further than that because, they claim, some people quite like the flexibility of a zero hours contract, including uni students, who make up 20 percent of zero hours workers. Lawyers call the legislation “toothless“and claim that the policy lacks any real enforcement measures.

Now, workers are can sign up to multiple potential employers, all of whom are free to offer them no hours whatsoever.

2016: Zero hours contracts at nearly one million

Before he was forced to go on an early holiday by Brexit, David Cameron refused to outright ban zero hours contracts as Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley admits that his company paid people less than the living wage.

When the Labour leadership election kicks off, Corbyn and Smith fight it out to be the working man‘s best friend, both have come out to pledge an end to zero hours contracts. But when asked what he would replace the zero hours contracts with, Smith says: “Well it could be one [hour]. But it can’t be zero.” I‘m looking forward to coming into work for one hour before being sent home with a shiny £7.20 in my pocket.

In response to this seeminlyg renewed Labour vigour on the subject of workers’ rights, Plaid Cymru claim that the party have in fact consistently blocked their attempts to ban zero hours contracts in Wales, despite that being the only place where Labour are actually in government.

In September, the ONS Labour force survey announces that the number of people on zero hours contracts has jumped 21 percent in a year. From 747,000 in April to June 2015, to 903,000 in the same period this year. Still, it‘s a good thing all these politicians have been promising to put a stop to this for years.

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