7 ms·

Number of UK workers on zero-hours contracts hits record high ahead of crackdown

65 points by robtherobber 8mo ago

SolubleSnake 8mo ago
These were always a disaster. It's essentially trying to 'Uberify' the entire economy. Be your own boss etc...People just end up sitting by the phone waiting for 2 or 3 hours of minimum wage work a day. Maybe this is possible with living with mum and dad as a youngster, or living with a higher earning spouse and looking after children...A normal person could never realistically do them it was a stupid idea to begin with
- monero-xmr 8mo ago
  The UK is poor and getting poorer every year. People simply don’t start companies there. Making the labor market even worse isn’t going to fix the structural issues that are reducing living standards year after year
  - n4r9 8mo ago
    That claim doesn't hold up to the figures: https://www.smeweb.com/total-number-of-uk-businesses-rises-driven-by-increase-in-sole-traders-and-micro-companies/ https://www.smeweb.com/total-number-of-uk-businesses-rises-d...
    - Anonyneko 8mo ago
      >the number of employing businesses decreasing by 9,000 (0.7%), but the number of non-employing businesses rising by 201,000 (4.9%) Isn't "non-employing business" an euphemism of sorts for "Uber driver"? No idea though if the UK is already forcing Uber to hire drivers and couriers as employees or not yet.
      - lnsru 8mo ago
        I am self employed electrician in Germany. I will never ever hire someone due to sick regulations here. I can work with clothing and tools I want. I can use my old stable ladder. For my employee I must get very expensive hardware and be liable for his work and his health. So thanks, it will never happen. I work all the time with other self employed people and they do share same opinion.
        Timon3 8mo ago
        I don't want to misinterpret you, and your point about very expensive hardware surely has merit... But what makes it a "sick regulation" for you to "be liable for his work and his health"? That seems like the absolute bare minimum?
      - pseudalopex 8mo ago
        > Isn't "non-employing business" an euphemism of sorts for "Uber driver"? It was older than Uber. But it includes Uber drivers now.
  - jen20 8mo ago
    Most of the fall in living standards since 2016 can be attributed solely to one thing: Brexit.
- nickdothutton 8mo ago
  The amount of regulation a company has to comply with to hire and retain a "real" (non-uberised) worker in the UK has been increased to a great degree since the mid 90s. Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment. There is no limit to the number of platforms/firms he can sign on with. If company x provides too few hours or undesirable terms then he can add company y and company z. Uberization is a predictable outcome where hiring risk is increased and assigned solely to the employer.
  - tikkabhuna 8mo ago
    Zero our contracts is used far beyond the "Uber"-style gig work where people can choose when they want to work. Often its used in for any sort of minimum wage job where there is a significant imbalance where employers have the power to offer as little/much work as they want and penalise workers who can't/won't take those shifts.
    - nickdothutton 8mo ago
      Unfortunately the UK now has an economy which is 83% services vs around 50% in 1970. Services are much more volatile with less certainty than say manufacturing or primary industry. So employment in services is going to be volatile and hard to predict, certainty has declined for all, employers and workers. A given employer only has the power if he is the only, or one of just a few in town. If not then the worker has the opportunity to seek hours somewhere else from someone else, at least if these jobs/gigs are relatively unskilled, which most are. What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies". A barista in London may be offered £21K per year to work all his shifts (I'm looking at a job ad), yet needs double that to live, so government "subsidises" the employer by providing the other "missing" £20K in universal credit, housing benefit, and so on. It's no wonder employers take advantage of this. Meanwhile the customer thinks his coffee costs him £3, in fact the true cost is a multiple of that because of the ~£20K "subsidy". Meanwhile you can hear the faint sound of laughter, which is the employer, knowing that the taxpayer is picking up half his true wage bill.
- samiv 8mo ago
  This is a tremendous opportunity for the capitalists and industrialists to dodge their obligations towards normal employees. Essentially outsource their costs, healthcare, pension, unemployment etc employee protections to the working class while additionally driving down the wages. They profit and the rest of the society (Ie the tax payers that still remain) have to shoulder the cost. A labour union in Finland interviewed some Wolt gig workers and found that after discounting for time waited for delivery and expenses their effective take home pay was around 2.5€ per hour. We can expect this to spread more and more from taxis and delivery service to wider spectrums.
  - lotsofpulp 8mo ago
    > costs, healthcare, pension, unemployment etc employee protections It makes no sense for these to be the responsibility of a buyer. Let people buy and sell products and services, and let the government collect tax and provide subsidies.
    - HPsquared 8mo ago
      I was thinking the same. Isn't it a bit of a power imbalance for your employer to look after all of those aspects of your life? It's not far from there to company towns. If you lose/quit the job, you lose health insurance and so on. Not a good bargaining position.
      - array_key_first 8mo ago
        I think it makes sense to give some of the cost to businesses because they also create some of the cost. For example, in the US you have to pay unemployment tax based off of your business' turnover. If you hire and fire a lot of people, you cause more unemployment, so you have to pay more taxes to cover your societal cost. It makes sense. The key point is that it's just a tax. The government should still be the one doing unemployment, although they're not, but that would be the ideal. So maybe if you have, say, a dangerous business you pay more healthcare tax or something. That could work instead of letting companies provide health insurance.
    - 8mo ago
- nephihaha 8mo ago
  Uberify? Funny, I continually tell people I refuse to use Uber because of its labour policies and it fails to register for them. I have never used Uber, Deliveroo or Just Eat which are trashy, exploitative companies.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- em-bee 8mo ago
  gig economy is like working as a freelancer except the pay is lower. and that's the problem. working as a freelancer only works out because i get a higher per hour rate so that i can deal with downtimes where i get no work. gig work should have a higher minimum wage. double from normal at least. if minimum wage is $12 per hour. then gig-minimum should be $24 per hour. and there should be minimum hours of work guaranteed. these may be negotiable, but the big issue is that gig workers don't have the negotiation power and competence to work this out on their own. that's the whole reason why we have laws to protect employees in the first place. as a freelancer i have no protection, but i knew that going in and made a choice. gig-workers don't know that, and they often do gig work as a last resort, so they have no choice. laws haven't caught up yet to protect them.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo ago
In the UK it is very much survival of the fittest except you are competing against everyone in the world. If you can't manage that competition you will inevitably be pushed out of London or any of the major cities and very quickly find yourself at the bottom of the social ladder. The UK is a free for all and naturally more people have become exploitive or desperate because of it.
- graemep 8mo ago
  Not living in a major city puts you at the bottom of the social ladder? Wow. A lot of people living outside major cities seem to have a better quality of live than those in them.
  - hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo ago
    It is where most of the economic activity is. Many parts of the UK are poor.
    - nickdothutton 8mo ago
      One of the most interesting government charts (to me at least) is the "Net fiscal balance by geographic region" one from the ONS[1] (Figure 8). Spoiler: London and to a much lesser extent, the SE, are the only regions with positive net fiscal balance at all. A sorry state of affairs. [1]https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/articles/countryandregionalpublicsectorfinances/financialyearending2023 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe... Figure 8.
      - graemep 8mo ago
        That is not really measuring things like quality of life etc. It just shows tax payments are higher (because incomes are higher, property is worth more, and lots of companies that operate nationally, or even internationally, are registered with London addresses) by more than government expenditure is higher. Someone living outside London might have a lower income but also have much lower expenses (especially rent or mortgage payments, but lots of other things).
Urahandystar 8mo ago
The main reason for this was employers could cut your hours if they had a poor month and needed to balance the books. Which is understandable for smaller businesses. Then the bigger companies went nuts with it and ended up massively changing the dynamics of work. This change should go further in killing off the zombie companies that exist which means another spike in the unemployment rates. Coupled with the figures on the UK topping AI replacement of workers charts things are looking really grim. The UK desperately needs a functioning angel and VC culture to absorb this but it looks like the cart has bolted before the horse.
- tokai 8mo ago
  >The UK desperately needs a functioning angel and VC culture That is like the last thing they need. Functioning unions and collective bargining is the proven way to combat this.
  - triceratops 8mo ago
    From far away it sounds like they need both. Stronger businesses that make more money, and stronger unions to ensure the money is shared.
    - UK-Al05 8mo ago
      The average VC business is not very strong. They rely on power laws.
      - triceratops 8mo ago
        The ones that pan out create an ecosystem of related businesses, suppliers, and customers. They create millionaires and billionaires who go on to start their own companies. Strong businesses are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for strong unions.
- TimByte 8mo ago
  Zero-hours contracts probably started as a pragmatic tool for genuinely small, volatile businesses, but they scaled into something very different when large employers adopted them systematically
CalRobert 8mo ago
The entire situation where you have great rights for “permanent” workers but nothing but precarity for so called “temporary” workers has been a disaster in Europe. It creates an entire underclass, even for people in high paying jobs. It was easier to get a mortgage, etc. in the US as an at-will employee who could be fired at any time than it was as a worker on a temp contract in Europe, in part because at least in the US there was a level playing field. I realise the UK isn’t in the EU but it is part of the broader trend of creating a privileged class of permanent workers over all others. This also increases friction in the labour market since changing jobs means likely giving up a permanent contract.
- philipallstar 8mo ago
  > in part because at least in the US there was a level playing field. Also the main guarantee of income isn't regulations, it's other employers.
TimByte 8mo ago
This feels like one of those policies where the intent makes sense, but the second-order effects are going to matter a lot
petercooper 8mo ago
"Instead, employers will likely increase their reliance on temporary workers with fixed-term contracts" It's no quick fix. The new six month (previously two year) unfair dismissal rules from January 2027 already impact annual fixed term contracts. As the end of a fixed term contract is legally a "dismissal", it'll be necessary to go through the full process. I suspect some low-level service industry employers will sense the weakness of the jobs market and increase employee turnover by giving people contracts of under six months then rinse and repeat from the queue of applicants, which would suck for someone who wants a temporary job for a year or two like students.
Nifty3929 8mo ago
If you're on a "zero-hours contract" with one company, are you allowed to be employed by or on contracts with other companies as well? What are the consequences of not being available to work when called in on short notice? In the US we do basically the same thing, but we just call it a part-time job. Very common to be working for 2, 3 or even more different companies on a part-time basis. Is that the case in the UK as well, or is that not a thing?
- Xophmeister 8mo ago
  We have "part time" as well, but it's different from zero hours. Part timers are usually (AFAIK) salaried employees that work a fixed <1 FTE (but not zero) and paid pro rata, with the usual statutory benefits such as holiday entitlement, pension, etc. You _could_ work multiple PT positions, if you could get them to line up and your employment contracts say it's fine. Zero hours, to my understanding, is different: I'm not sure what statutory benefits you're entitled to, but yes, I believe you can be signed up to many zero hour contracts and it's up to you whether you take a job with (in theory) no repercussions if you choose not to.
xnorswap 8mo ago
A zero hours contract has been useful for me, as someone who needed to work around a medical condition. I worked the hours I could, got paid for them, but I could also take days off at short notice if I wasn't up to working that day. I have had to negotiate a reduced-hours permanent contract now, but the zero-hours contract I had has genuinely helped me a lot, and was more flexible than the reduced hours contract I'm moving to. But I also accept that not everyone is in the privileged position of being a software developer at a good company, and that there are many predatory companies taking the piss. So I support the crackdown on zero-hours while also finding myself missing the fact that I will no longer benefit from it.
- iberator 8mo ago
  You must be joking. How would you heal yourself if you gonna get 1h per week for next 1 year?
  - xnorswap 8mo ago
    Firstly, I have a good relationship with my employer, so I'm the one choosing my hours. It would have been legal for them to reduce my hours to zero, but I trusted them not to do that, and indeed they didn't do that. Secondly, we have the NHS, so my access to healthcare is not tied to my employment nor my ability to pay. I can only share my experience, and as I said, I recognise this isn't the norm for most zero-hours contractors out there, who are in much worse conditions and have uncertainty, which is why I support the changes in law around them.

65 points by robtherobber 8mo ago

These were always a disaster. It's essentially trying to 'Uberify' the entire economy. Be your own boss etc...People just end up sitting by the phone waiting for 2 or 3 hours of minimum wage work a day. Maybe this is possible with living with mum and dad as a youngster, or living with a higher earning spouse and looking after children...A normal person could never realistically do them it was a stupid idea to begin with

monero-xmr 8mo ago
The UK is poor and getting poorer every year. People simply don’t start companies there. Making the labor market even worse isn’t going to fix the structural issues that are reducing living standards year after year
- n4r9 8mo ago
  That claim doesn't hold up to the figures: https://www.smeweb.com/total-number-of-uk-businesses-rises-driven-by-increase-in-sole-traders-and-micro-companies/ https://www.smeweb.com/total-number-of-uk-businesses-rises-d...
  - Anonyneko 8mo ago
    >the number of employing businesses decreasing by 9,000 (0.7%), but the number of non-employing businesses rising by 201,000 (4.9%) Isn't "non-employing business" an euphemism of sorts for "Uber driver"? No idea though if the UK is already forcing Uber to hire drivers and couriers as employees or not yet.
    - lnsru 8mo ago
      I am self employed electrician in Germany. I will never ever hire someone due to sick regulations here. I can work with clothing and tools I want. I can use my old stable ladder. For my employee I must get very expensive hardware and be liable for his work and his health. So thanks, it will never happen. I work all the time with other self employed people and they do share same opinion.
      - Timon3 8mo ago
        I don't want to misinterpret you, and your point about very expensive hardware surely has merit... But what makes it a "sick regulation" for you to "be liable for his work and his health"? That seems like the absolute bare minimum?
    - pseudalopex 8mo ago
      > Isn't "non-employing business" an euphemism of sorts for "Uber driver"? It was older than Uber. But it includes Uber drivers now.
- jen20 8mo ago
  Most of the fall in living standards since 2016 can be attributed solely to one thing: Brexit.
nickdothutton 8mo ago
The amount of regulation a company has to comply with to hire and retain a "real" (non-uberised) worker in the UK has been increased to a great degree since the mid 90s. Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment. There is no limit to the number of platforms/firms he can sign on with. If company x provides too few hours or undesirable terms then he can add company y and company z. Uberization is a predictable outcome where hiring risk is increased and assigned solely to the employer.
- tikkabhuna 8mo ago
  Zero our contracts is used far beyond the "Uber"-style gig work where people can choose when they want to work. Often its used in for any sort of minimum wage job where there is a significant imbalance where employers have the power to offer as little/much work as they want and penalise workers who can't/won't take those shifts.
  - nickdothutton 8mo ago
    Unfortunately the UK now has an economy which is 83% services vs around 50% in 1970. Services are much more volatile with less certainty than say manufacturing or primary industry. So employment in services is going to be volatile and hard to predict, certainty has declined for all, employers and workers. A given employer only has the power if he is the only, or one of just a few in town. If not then the worker has the opportunity to seek hours somewhere else from someone else, at least if these jobs/gigs are relatively unskilled, which most are. What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies". A barista in London may be offered £21K per year to work all his shifts (I'm looking at a job ad), yet needs double that to live, so government "subsidises" the employer by providing the other "missing" £20K in universal credit, housing benefit, and so on. It's no wonder employers take advantage of this. Meanwhile the customer thinks his coffee costs him £3, in fact the true cost is a multiple of that because of the ~£20K "subsidy". Meanwhile you can hear the faint sound of laughter, which is the employer, knowing that the taxpayer is picking up half his true wage bill.
samiv 8mo ago
This is a tremendous opportunity for the capitalists and industrialists to dodge their obligations towards normal employees. Essentially outsource their costs, healthcare, pension, unemployment etc employee protections to the working class while additionally driving down the wages. They profit and the rest of the society (Ie the tax payers that still remain) have to shoulder the cost. A labour union in Finland interviewed some Wolt gig workers and found that after discounting for time waited for delivery and expenses their effective take home pay was around 2.5€ per hour. We can expect this to spread more and more from taxis and delivery service to wider spectrums.
- lotsofpulp 8mo ago
  > costs, healthcare, pension, unemployment etc employee protections It makes no sense for these to be the responsibility of a buyer. Let people buy and sell products and services, and let the government collect tax and provide subsidies.
  - HPsquared 8mo ago
    I was thinking the same. Isn't it a bit of a power imbalance for your employer to look after all of those aspects of your life? It's not far from there to company towns. If you lose/quit the job, you lose health insurance and so on. Not a good bargaining position.
    - array_key_first 8mo ago
      I think it makes sense to give some of the cost to businesses because they also create some of the cost. For example, in the US you have to pay unemployment tax based off of your business' turnover. If you hire and fire a lot of people, you cause more unemployment, so you have to pay more taxes to cover your societal cost. It makes sense. The key point is that it's just a tax. The government should still be the one doing unemployment, although they're not, but that would be the ideal. So maybe if you have, say, a dangerous business you pay more healthcare tax or something. That could work instead of letting companies provide health insurance.
  - 8mo ago
nephihaha 8mo ago
Uberify? Funny, I continually tell people I refuse to use Uber because of its labour policies and it fails to register for them. I have never used Uber, Deliveroo or Just Eat which are trashy, exploitative companies.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
em-bee 8mo ago
gig economy is like working as a freelancer except the pay is lower. and that's the problem. working as a freelancer only works out because i get a higher per hour rate so that i can deal with downtimes where i get no work. gig work should have a higher minimum wage. double from normal at least. if minimum wage is $12 per hour. then gig-minimum should be $24 per hour. and there should be minimum hours of work guaranteed. these may be negotiable, but the big issue is that gig workers don't have the negotiation power and competence to work this out on their own. that's the whole reason why we have laws to protect employees in the first place. as a freelancer i have no protection, but i knew that going in and made a choice. gig-workers don't know that, and they often do gig work as a last resort, so they have no choice. laws haven't caught up yet to protect them.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo ago

In the UK it is very much survival of the fittest except you are competing against everyone in the world. If you can't manage that competition you will inevitably be pushed out of London or any of the major cities and very quickly find yourself at the bottom of the social ladder. The UK is a free for all and naturally more people have become exploitive or desperate because of it.

graemep 8mo ago
Not living in a major city puts you at the bottom of the social ladder? Wow. A lot of people living outside major cities seem to have a better quality of live than those in them.
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo ago
  It is where most of the economic activity is. Many parts of the UK are poor.
  - nickdothutton 8mo ago
    One of the most interesting government charts (to me at least) is the "Net fiscal balance by geographic region" one from the ONS[1] (Figure 8). Spoiler: London and to a much lesser extent, the SE, are the only regions with positive net fiscal balance at all. A sorry state of affairs. [1]https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/articles/countryandregionalpublicsectorfinances/financialyearending2023 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe... Figure 8.
    - graemep 8mo ago
      That is not really measuring things like quality of life etc. It just shows tax payments are higher (because incomes are higher, property is worth more, and lots of companies that operate nationally, or even internationally, are registered with London addresses) by more than government expenditure is higher. Someone living outside London might have a lower income but also have much lower expenses (especially rent or mortgage payments, but lots of other things).

Urahandystar 8mo ago

The main reason for this was employers could cut your hours if they had a poor month and needed to balance the books. Which is understandable for smaller businesses. Then the bigger companies went nuts with it and ended up massively changing the dynamics of work. This change should go further in killing off the zombie companies that exist which means another spike in the unemployment rates. Coupled with the figures on the UK topping AI replacement of workers charts things are looking really grim. The UK desperately needs a functioning angel and VC culture to absorb this but it looks like the cart has bolted before the horse.

tokai 8mo ago
>The UK desperately needs a functioning angel and VC culture That is like the last thing they need. Functioning unions and collective bargining is the proven way to combat this.
- triceratops 8mo ago
  From far away it sounds like they need both. Stronger businesses that make more money, and stronger unions to ensure the money is shared.
  - UK-Al05 8mo ago
    The average VC business is not very strong. They rely on power laws.
    - triceratops 8mo ago
      The ones that pan out create an ecosystem of related businesses, suppliers, and customers. They create millionaires and billionaires who go on to start their own companies. Strong businesses are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for strong unions.
TimByte 8mo ago
Zero-hours contracts probably started as a pragmatic tool for genuinely small, volatile businesses, but they scaled into something very different when large employers adopted them systematically

CalRobert 8mo ago

The entire situation where you have great rights for “permanent” workers but nothing but precarity for so called “temporary” workers has been a disaster in Europe. It creates an entire underclass, even for people in high paying jobs. It was easier to get a mortgage, etc. in the US as an at-will employee who could be fired at any time than it was as a worker on a temp contract in Europe, in part because at least in the US there was a level playing field. I realise the UK isn’t in the EU but it is part of the broader trend of creating a privileged class of permanent workers over all others. This also increases friction in the labour market since changing jobs means likely giving up a permanent contract.

philipallstar 8mo ago
> in part because at least in the US there was a level playing field. Also the main guarantee of income isn't regulations, it's other employers.

TimByte 8mo ago

This feels like one of those policies where the intent makes sense, but the second-order effects are going to matter a lot

petercooper 8mo ago

"Instead, employers will likely increase their reliance on temporary workers with fixed-term contracts" It's no quick fix. The new six month (previously two year) unfair dismissal rules from January 2027 already impact annual fixed term contracts. As the end of a fixed term contract is legally a "dismissal", it'll be necessary to go through the full process. I suspect some low-level service industry employers will sense the weakness of the jobs market and increase employee turnover by giving people contracts of under six months then rinse and repeat from the queue of applicants, which would suck for someone who wants a temporary job for a year or two like students.

Nifty3929 8mo ago

If you're on a "zero-hours contract" with one company, are you allowed to be employed by or on contracts with other companies as well? What are the consequences of not being available to work when called in on short notice? In the US we do basically the same thing, but we just call it a part-time job. Very common to be working for 2, 3 or even more different companies on a part-time basis. Is that the case in the UK as well, or is that not a thing?

Xophmeister 8mo ago
We have "part time" as well, but it's different from zero hours. Part timers are usually (AFAIK) salaried employees that work a fixed <1 FTE (but not zero) and paid pro rata, with the usual statutory benefits such as holiday entitlement, pension, etc. You _could_ work multiple PT positions, if you could get them to line up and your employment contracts say it's fine. Zero hours, to my understanding, is different: I'm not sure what statutory benefits you're entitled to, but yes, I believe you can be signed up to many zero hour contracts and it's up to you whether you take a job with (in theory) no repercussions if you choose not to.

xnorswap 8mo ago

A zero hours contract has been useful for me, as someone who needed to work around a medical condition. I worked the hours I could, got paid for them, but I could also take days off at short notice if I wasn't up to working that day. I have had to negotiate a reduced-hours permanent contract now, but the zero-hours contract I had has genuinely helped me a lot, and was more flexible than the reduced hours contract I'm moving to. But I also accept that not everyone is in the privileged position of being a software developer at a good company, and that there are many predatory companies taking the piss. So I support the crackdown on zero-hours while also finding myself missing the fact that I will no longer benefit from it.

iberator 8mo ago
You must be joking. How would you heal yourself if you gonna get 1h per week for next 1 year?
- xnorswap 8mo ago
  Firstly, I have a good relationship with my employer, so I'm the one choosing my hours. It would have been legal for them to reduce my hours to zero, but I trusted them not to do that, and indeed they didn't do that. Secondly, we have the NHS, so my access to healthcare is not tied to my employment nor my ability to pay. I can only share my experience, and as I said, I recognise this isn't the norm for most zero-hours contractors out there, who are in much worse conditions and have uncertainty, which is why I support the changes in law around them.