Off Topic Great Britain General Election May 7th 2015.

I agree.

they are really impossible. If someone is a guy say who ****ed himself up early on and has the qualifications of a pea but is a worker. He wants to work two jobs to get by... job one is at the beckoned call of that employer at unpredictable hours. Its not say 12 noon to 5 or 5 to 10pm etc. its one day this then next day that maybe nothing the following two days

how can he get job 2 to sync up ever.

just as an example.

the other side is the job gets him off the dole but the hours are not enough to live on so the tories are quite happy. they don't care he can't live but wants to work. they'll only care if he wants help and then put blocks in his way.

 

I don't necessarily believe Zero hours is a bad thing. Just the way its been implemented has been bad. Zero hours suits a minority of people but is being horribly abused by certain companies.

I don't know if its viable (tax codes, having someone signed on) but if a person can be employed by another company and hold one/many zero hour contracts with the option to refuse the work if they have other things on (obviously the employer would see this negatively if you are refusing hoursand maybe prioritise who they offer the hours to) but for me, the point of the zero hours is to quickly ramp up and ramp down on your workforce depending how busy you are. Where zero hours is failing (not 100% sure of this) is that certain companies are preventing the zero hours employee from taking up work anywhere else.

Is it better than giving temporary or part time contracts? I'm not sure. Maybe we should just do away with them....

 

This 100%, as a comparison, the number of zero hours contracts in the US has almost tripled due to the obligations of employers who have full time staff. Zero hour contracts are abused to the hilt.

 

If you have a zero hrs contract and your employer asks you to work 40 hrs one week, you're obliged to do it, therefore if you did have another zero hrs contract you'd be unable to fulfill the hrs they asked you to do in the same week, so the answer is self explanatory.

Employers latched on to it, as it meant they no longer had to have full time employees to cover a work place that has fluctuations in footfall. So they can vary their staffing levels by the day, calling people in (or not) completely to suit themselves. It's no way to expect people to live. One week with maybe 40 hrs work, the next with 10. It's immoral when used solely to cut staffing costs without a thought for the social impact on the staff themselves.

 

may as well be picking up migrants on the border to pick fruit...

 

Under Zero hour contract, you can refuse not to work, and your employer is not under obligation to provide you work.

 

Exactly. A couple of euro an hour to pick cucumbers. Germany is full of Poles who've run out of social security time, and need to feed their families and themselves who simply wander over the border to be abused.

 

It would depend what is written in the contract. If it says the person must be available at a drop of a hat then you have a point. However, contracts are a two way thing and would often have things that favour the employee too. The way you describe it it is like a ownership of somebody.

I agree that zero hour contracts are completely immoral though, they should be abolished.

 

Key Points of Zero hour contract:
Zero hours contracts
Key points:

• Zero hours contracts normally mean there is no obligation for employers to offer work, or for workers to accept it.
• Most zero hours contracts will give staff 'worker' employment status.
• Zero hours workers have the same employment rights as regular workers, although they may have breaks in their contracts, which affect rights that accrue over time.
• Zero hours workers are entitled to annual leave, the National Minimum Wageand pay for work-related travel in the same way as regular workers.

What are they?
The term 'zero hours' is not defined in legislation, but is generally understood to be a employment contract between an employer and a worker, which means the employer is not obliged to provide the worker with any minimum working hours, and the worker is not obliged to accept any of the hours offered.

It is important that both the employer and worker are aware of the fact that a zero hours contract can make their relationship different to other employment contract arrangements.

From Personal Experience:
I was on Zero hour contract with an employer (because it suits me perfectly well). They offered
me a job which I refused, because I had to wake up too early. They called me and offered me
a 35 hour contract which I accepted.
Under Zero hour contract you are entitled to holidays.

 

The reality is, that irrespective of what the contract may or not say in terms of the workers right not to accept the hours offered, they're obliged to fulfill them................as otherwise, they'll not get hours offered the next day, week, or month, as the employer will simply move on to another more obliging zero hours contract holder............

 

True although contracts with set hours in can be exactly the same. How many people working in care homes stick to just their contracted hours for example?

 

The salient difference is that unless specifically contractually agreed, overtime is not obligatory. Therefore, the employee has a genuine choice. There tends to be give and take, in most employer / employee relationships, with permanent teams working together to fulfill a work need. Zero hours employees within an organisation which also has full time contracted staff, tend to feel (and act) like 2nd class citizens. It's a strange dynamic.

 

You're of course right, overtime is obligatory but if you're on a zero hours contract, every minute you do is overtime. In theory, the employee should always have a choice but as you rightly said above for a zero hours contract; "the employer will simply move on to another more obliging zero hours contract holder", the same applies to someone that is contracted for thirty hours a week, if they regularly don't do it then the chances are they'll be out of employment soon rather than later. There are employment laws in place to prevent these things happened but it doesn't prevent them and never will.

Zero hour contracts are **** and should be abolished but because its not fair to have someone on a leash that could see them not work a single minute for a month and still not be able to claim any sort of benefit either. Its basically putting someone in a impossible position and will inevitably lead to other things such as crime or god forbid, worse.

 

Absolutely.

I can't imagine what it must be like to try and plan (and fund) your family life, when you have no idea what you'll be earning from week to week.

It's a typical Tory loophole that they've turned a blind eye to and allowed the corporate World to exploit it, without a care for the reality of the Social Security budget (which picks up the shortfall between worked hours and what people need to live on) which is in essence a subsidy that is going straight to the bottom line of a whole host of businesses. As they're reducing their staffing costs at the expense of the tax payer.

The ultimate reason why they've allowed this to continue, despite the obvious gaping flaws in it from a National budget perspective, is that it keeps 100's of thousands off the official unemployment stats.

 

****ing hell. Why can't I post? Your point about unemployment numbers is ****ing bang on.

 

The increasing minimum wage to at least the living wage argument is just as frustrating IMO. If someone is on bare minimum wage, they can get it topped up using Working Tax Credits so long as they're working enough hours (various on circumstances) each week. Its the usually political BS of shifting numbers so they can claim to have improve society. Bit like how every now and again they'll alter what qualifies for SSP which inevitably as a knock on effect to the out of work claimants. If they get the minimum wages up to the living wages then there will be less people claiming Working Tax Credits and the claim will be "we're saving X per year on benefit payments".

 

In real terms since 2008, the gap between those on the minimum wage and either salaried, semi skilled or skilled workers has reduced year on year.

That's not to say that the minimum wage is too high, it merely means that those who sit marginally above it have very often recieved no yearly increments since the crash, whereas those on the minimum have had a yearly uplift.

There's people is what would be generally considered to be 'decent' jobs who if they have young families are often claiming tax credits to supplement their income.

The 'living wage' is a fine concept, but it would completely remove the current gap between the lowest paid and sector I've described above. Thus causing massive inflationary pressure as they demanded an increase that restored the parity. It's a sad state of affairs that a Nation as wealthy as ours can't provide millions of working people, a living wage. Something is drastically wrong, and it needs a generation of policies driven by a desire for social fairness to put it right.

 

That's a problem I've already incurred at work. The last two increases have seen the caretaker reach one of the admin staff levels both times so in both instances, I've had to increase the admin wage further. This is starting to encroach on a three staff member now too. Being a charity organisation over the last five or six years as seen hard times so wages have been very static. At the start of the recession, we had eighteen staff (roughly 500hrs per week in total), we now have four that do a total of 105hrs per week.