News

The UK government has today moved to ban the exclusivity clauses in Zero Hours Contracts, which prevent people from working for another employer, even when their contract does not guarantee any actual work. This change will affect only 125,000 of the 1.4 million UK workers bound by such contracts and fails to address the real concerns workers and communities have around the use of such contracts.

Rather than dealing with the real issues zero hours contracts bring - that they do not offer secure hours, that they deliver precarious jobs and lives, and that they drive poor workplace conditions and give unprecedented power to employers - the UK government has chosen to eradicate possibly the most glaringly unfair element of these contracts while leaving the form of the contracts fundamentally unchanged. Zero Hours Contracts are increasingly common in the UK care sector where it is estimated that around 370,000 of such contracts are in place. The use of these contractual arrangements is expanding globally.

Zero Hours Contracts undermine the provision of decent care to those who need it in our communities, and they force workers into untenable situations where, from week to week, they cannot guarantee their working hours will cover the basics of life, such as rent, food, bills and transport. These contracts offer incentives to employers to take on a lower paid, temporary or transient workforce which may be under or untrained, at the expense of retaining experienced staff. The  'flexibility' these contracts offer is flexibility for the employer, not the worker. But more perniciously, the costs and risks of a working life are increasingly being shouldered by workers.

See UNI Global Union's previous articles on Zero Hours Contracts here:
http://www.uniglobalunion.org/news/uk-zero-hours-contracts-more-prevalent-previously-thought
http://www.uniglobalunion.org/news/uk-report-370000-zero-hours-contracts-social-care-sector