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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

• tikkabhuna 7mo 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 7mo 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.
    • joe_mamba 7mo ago
      >What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies". Wait a second, Isn't this just corporate welfare and goes against capitalism and supply/demand free market economics? Why should other people's taxes subsidize other people's businesses? If your business is a net negative to the economy due to it only being able to survive on subsidies, then it has no right to exist. We're not talking about subsidizing national security industries like semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, renewables, pharma, we're talking about subsidizing someone's cafe/fast food business so they as a business owner can pocket the profits while paying their staff below market and having the taxpayer pick up the tab for the difference. Or is this just a cloaked form of UBI to prevent mass unemployment?
      • relaxing 7mo ago
        Capitalism is not a sincerely held belief. The true belief is “my business, at the expense of yours.”
        • toomuchtodo 7mo ago
          Very similar to how religion and their associated belief systems are used to control others. I suppose one could consider capitalism a form of religion and "sacred values" that faces an almost autoimmune response when the belief system is challenged, as it also challenges the human's identity (in some cases).
          • robtherobber 7mo ago
            Precisely. There are even strong arguments to support this take; they speak about a "free market" that simply never existed, an "invisible hand" that supposedly beneficial, the ridiculous belief that competition always improves outcomes, the equation of price with value, the (HN favourite) that profit proves virtue / merit, consumer choice = freedom, and so, so many other unfounded or partially true beliefs.
      • em-bee 7mo ago
  • oytis 7mo ago
    > penalise workers who can't/won't take those shifts. Wouldn't this problem better solved with a normal contract that obliges the worker to take the shifts the employer is interested in?
• behringer 7mo ago
  Sounds horrifying and you should feel bad for even writing that.
  • CalRobert 7mo ago
    Emergent properties of skewed incentive systems is not the author’s responsibility.
    • behringer 7mo ago
      The part > Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment. Makes it sound like employer and employee are on equal footing. That is very much not the case.
• Forgeties79 7mo ago
  > Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment. This is basically a cousin to “at-will” hiring rationalization in the US. It’s nonsense in that case, and it’s nonsense with zero hour contracts. There is a little to no benefit to employees. It just puts them in an even more precarious situation. The power dynamics are not fair between them and employers, those kinds of systems are inherently lopsided. Yet proponents keep insisting it levels the playing field. I don’t get it. It’s basically arguing for the fusion of worst parts of being a hired employee and a freelance contractor. Both have advantages, both have compromises, and these “gig economy” jobs make sure that basically none of the benefits of being a contractor exist.
  • lotsofpulp 7mo ago
    “Right to work”, in the US, is about being able to work for an employer without joining the employee union. “At will” employment is the term you are thinking of.
    • Forgeties79 7mo ago
      Yes thank you I always do that!
• jen20 7mo ago
  If this is the reason (I don’t believe it personally) then there should be no problem with an outright ban on non-compete agreements for zero-hour contracts. Somehow I don’t think employers will agree.
  • nickdothutton 7mo ago
    Non-compete agreements (or any clause restricting working elsewhere) are generally not enforceable in UK zero-hours contracts. Explicitly since January 2016, and in practice before then.[1] [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/zero-hours-contracts-guidance-for-employers/zero-hours-contracts-guidance-for-employers https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/zero-hours-contra... (Bottom para.)
• TimByte 7mo ago
  I think this is true for a certain category of worker, but it depends heavily on whether the flexibility is actually symmetrical in practice
  • nickdothutton 7mo ago
    For largely unskilled service sector jobs, where one might consider the worker relatively interchangeable, it is particularly bad if your government also has an "infinite immigration" policy in practice.[1] [1] Inward migration to the UK was 1.3M people in the year to June 2023. UK population was about 67/68M at the time.
    • Macha 7mo ago
      Huh, I expected that to be a Ukraine related surge given the time period chosen but actually Ukraine looks to be (eyeballing a graph here) about 150,000 max in 2022 (if it counted for 100% of humanitarian cases) and 50,000 in 2024: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/yearendingdecember2024 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati... Anyway, looks like migration is now down to about 480,000, with the big drop occuring in the second half of 2024.
• robtherobber 7mo ago
  It seems that you're framing it as if regulation is some random burden that appeared out of nowhere rather than a defence mechanism that emerged because businesses repeatedly abused workers, cut corners, and pushed costs onto everyone else whenever they were allowed to. Work, technology, supply chains, data, health and safety, and the whole economy are all far more complex than they were in the 90s, of course regulation increased: we had to adjust to respond to the new challenges and everything else. It increased because the damage companies can do increased significantly too (we are literally discussing about existential threats to humanity and life on earth in the last few years), and because we learned again and again what happens when you leave everything to "the market" and trust firms to self-police. Also, this idea that gig work is some balanced freedom on both sides sounds nice in theory but falls apart in practice. I'd go as far as saying that it's naive. The company/platform keeps the power, sets the terms, and the worker carries the instability and everything that derives from that. "You can sign up to multiple apps" is not a real solution to insecure income, it's just telling people to juggle several unreliable income streams at once and hope enough scraps appear each week. And whereas for businesses "losing" means lower profits or no profits (with the worst case scenario being that they have to shut down), for workers this can mean huge financial insecurity, depression, lack of control, and potential destitution. I'd say the latter is markedly more dramatic. Put differently, it's not meaningful flexibility for most people, more like risk transfer. The business gets labour on demand without commitment, while the worker still has rent, bills, and food costs arriving on a fixed schedule and with the threat of actual death if they end up homeless in the winter. And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms? If a company depends on labour to function, employing people properly is not some unfair punishment - it's part of the cost of doing business in a civilised society. The only reason private enterprise is tolerated at all is that it is supposed to produce a social benefit. If a business model only works by making workers permanently disposable and pushing insecurity onto society, then that is a criticism of the business model, not of regulation. And it's probably not worth keeping the private sector either.
  • philipallstar 7mo ago
    > And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms Firms are just other people. They take on more and more risk. These days in the UK HR departments they often say you can't let someone go even in their probation period. Think how a experimental and risky a hire is, and how easy it is to quit a job that might not be any good vs how hard it is to get rid of an employee who isn't any good.
• scott_w 7mo ago
  0-hour contracts have nothing to do with "Uberised" working arrangements, which are essentially a contracted worker. In a 0-hour contract, the worker does not have the freedom to "offer labour without commitment." - They have an employment contract, so are an employee, not a self-employed contractor. - There are limitations on who else they could work for. - In practice, if they're called up to work last-minute, they can't say "no." For most 0-hour contracts, like retail, trying to setup your employees as self-employed contractors doesn't work because it's a blatant violation of the law. HMRC will come after you for employer's NI as you have disguised employees. Uber is a very different model because the way they setup the working arrangements allows them to keep taxi drivers outside the scope of disguised employees.
  • nickdothutton 7mo ago
    Non-compete or any kind of limitation on who a zero hours contract person can work for, has been specifically and explicitly illegal since 2016 in the UK. In practice it has been unenforceable since more or less forever. [1] [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/zero-hours-contracts-guidance-for-employers/zero-hours-contracts-guidance-for-employers https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/zero-hours-contra... (last para.)
    • scott_w 7mo ago
      Thanks for the info. I left retail work in 2011, when I definitely did have it in my contract, so things have changed a little bit since then.
  • varispeed 7mo ago
    > as you have disguised employees. That's such a classist term. Surely little working class person cannot have its own business, it's disguised employment! It's like micro agency with resource of 1. But somehow we don't say agencies run "disguised employment", because the profits are going to the rich shareholders instead of filthy unwashed pleb.
    • scott_w 7mo ago
• Leynos 7mo ago
  What do you see as unreasonable regulation?
• bartread 7mo ago
  Yeah, that's not how zero hour contracts work. In practice zero hour contracts mean that if a company wants you to work you often need to work because if you don't they can simply not give you any more hours in future. I.e., the big difference between a zero hour contract and gig work is that in that the company controls the hours, not you. And this isn't just because the companies are scummy, but for somewhat sensible operational reasons. Zero hour contracts are common in places like supermarkets because they allow companies to flex their staffing levels with, for example, seasonal demand (although there are other solutions to that problem that are better for employees!). On d day to day basis they might still need more shop floor workers on a busy Saturday than on a quiet Monday, so it means they need to be able to control the scheduling rather than workers controlling the scheduling to ensure they always have appropriate staffing levels. If you gave complete control to workers you'd regularly find you had too many people working at quiet times and too few at busy, and even if you put controls in place to avoid too many workers at a time, you'd never be able to guarantee that you'd have enough at busy times which wouldn't really be an acceptable outcome for anyone. But going back to your point of misunderstanding: zero contracts are perhaps more like the worst aspects of gig employment married to the worst aspects of non-gig employment, which means that they operate quite differently to gig employment.