Last week, Labour leader Ed Miliband promised to ban “zero-hours contracts” for staff who are working regular hours. The plan is to pass a law that gives employees the right to a standard contract after 12 weeks of working regular hours. He referred to an “epidemic of zero hours contracts” – saying that the numbers of such contracts had tripled since 2010 and risen by 20% since 2014.
In response, the Conservatives argued that zero-hours contracts account for just one in 50 jobs, many of them held by students and the retired, who presumably value the flexibility.
Is there really an “epidemic”? As the BBC notes, definitive data are hard to come by. Not everyone agrees on what a zero-hours contract is – as can be seen from the number of indignant MPs who now claim to employ staff on a “casual” or “ad-hoc” basis, rather than a zero-hours one.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) describes zero-hours contracts as “contracts that do not guarantee a minimum number of hours”.But one of its measures is self-reported – it relies on staff actually being aware that they are on such contracts, and there’s no doubt that awareness of the term has grown.
As the Full Fact website puts it, “the Labour Party is talking about an increase that may partly be explained by the Labour Party talking about zero-hours contracts”. The other figure asks an employer how many zero-hours contracts they use. But this refers to contracts, not workers – one worker could work several zero-hours jobs. In any case, as the ONS notes, only a third of those on zero-hour contracts say they want more hours, and only one in ten would prefer a different job. So it may not be quite the problem it’s made out to be.