Labour leader Ed Miliband’s pledge to require workers hired on zero-hours contracts to be moved to regular contracts after three months has pushed the issue of working conditions to the centre of the electoral battle. For Miliband, zero-hours contracts are “not good enough for the people of Britain”, as zero-hours workers – of which there are an estimated 1.8 million and rising – face insecurity and exploitation.
The Conservatives, in contrast, have stressed that they have already banned “abusive” exclusivity-clause zero-hours contracts that limit employees to one employer. Non-exclusive zero-hours contracts, for the Tories, offer employers and employees the flexibility that both want. This view has, somewhat unsurprisingly, been echoed by big business. John Cridland, director general of the Confederation of British Industry, responded to Miliband’s proposal, saying: “The UK’s flexible jobs market has given us an employment rate that is the envy of other countries … so a proposal to limit the flexibility on contracts to 12 weeks misses the mark.”
My personal experience of zero-hours contracts suggests that a “flexible jobs market” has come at the expense of basic worker rights, basic human dignity and fair remuneration. I, like 24,000 others, am a zero-hours academic. I work at a Russell Group university in a highly regarded department, have a PhD, am having my research published, teach more than 100 students and have been reviewed by both staff and students as an excellent teacher. By most counts, I am highly qualified, good at my job and successful in my career.
However, the reality of the situation is that my career success is only superficial. Instead, I am an expendable worker employed on a contract where the university’s needs are met, but mine are not. I am seasonally unemployed, as when teaching stops I am no longer needed by the university. I face a one- to two-month wait to be paid for work, as time sheets are submitted monthly and payment occurs at the end of the next month. I am paid between a third and a quarter of equivalent staff who have a similar or lesser teaching load; in fact over the last year, while teaching about 300 students, I’ve been paid only slightly more than a single student’s annual tuition fees. Perhaps most representative of how highly my employer regards me, is that the university only barely acknowledges my existence – I have no office and my name doesn’t appear on staff lists; in terms of workplace representation, I only really exist to my students in classroom hours.
Miliband’s proposal has been criticised as being likely to result in employers not hiring workers or simply sacking them before they meet the three-month minimum. But in my situation, this appears highly unlikely. Universities need workhorse teachers in order to free up senior staff to attract more research funding. Likewise, if universities were to hire every three months, they would quickly exhaust the supply of high-quality teachers available in the local area, even with a glut of PhDs on the job market at the moment. More generally, for zero-hours workers in other industries, good business practices and service provision are not going to be supplied in the context of a staff being continually renewed; workers, critics may be surprised to hear, are vital to the strong performance of a company or a university.
One final point worth mentioning is that it’s not really a case of small companies being unable to afford more permanent hires – the most frequent users of zero-hours contracts are businesses with more than 250 staff. Universities could likely find some extra money by cutting (or not continuing to increase) the salaries of senior management, with vice-chancellor salaries currently averaging £260,000 a year (“klepto-remuneration” is what George Monbiot termed such pay inequalities).
While the call for a three-month limit to zero-hours contracts won’t end exploitative labour practices, it is certainly a start. I would imagine that if the three-month limit were ever implemented, businesses – universities in particular – would respond by shifting zero-hours workers on to part-time and fixed-term contracts. Such a move would promote greater security of income, greater security of employment (which, in turn, can allow for the pushing of greater labour rights) and promote a sense that employment is a reciprocal relationship, where the aim is that the interests of both parties are met.
Perhaps most importantly, ending zero-hours contracts will mean that staff such as myself are counted, and that we deserve the basic human dignity that has been stripped from us by exploitative and one-sided labour practices.