My working life has been full of insecurity and precarity. I’m 34 now and I wasn’t even paid minimum wage until I was over 25. Of the many, many jobs I’ve worked, I’ve been on a zero-hours contract on all but two occasions.
I’ve been trying to get into the fashion world for nine years. I graduated in 2015 with a degree in tailoring, which I thought would give me a massive scope of work I could do. But there aren’t any graduate jobs – there’s nothing.
For the past two years I’ve done some seasonal zero-hours work making the shop window displays for big stores in central London. But my situation otherwise is pretty hopeless. Of the 87 jobs I’ve applied for in the past three months on Indeed, only 30 have been viewed. Even then, the sad fact is that a zero-hours contract on minimum wage would leave me at the end of the month with less money than universal credit.
As a teenager, I lived in terrible poverty – my mum worked seven days a week and could barely afford to put food on the table. I got a job as soon as I could. From the age of 14 until I went to university, I worked in pubs for a few quid an hour, often so I could buy myself the basics such as food and school uniform.
Pubs are the worst for zero-hours contracts. In one place I worked, there was a schedule for the week written on a piece of paper pinned to the wall. But they would change your shift or just cross out your name the day before, or even the day of your shift. Complaining about this felt pointless because the attitude was often: “Well leave then, because we can just get someone else.”
It is easy to get punished for speaking up when your boss can drop your shifts at any time. When I worked in community care in my 20s, if you were sick and had to take a day off, you would often have your hours docked. And if someone didn’t like you, you would be pushed out. It’s the same in pubs. Having no rights or stability wrecks your mental and physical health, and destroys any hope.
Do I think Labour’s employment reforms will help? I’m pretty sceptical. As the proposals stand, those on zero-hours contracts will have the right to guaranteed hours, calculated to match the hours they work over a defined 12-week period. You can choose instead to be on a zero-hours contract – but if you “opt in”, what’s stopping an employer from keeping your hours down? Or cutting your hours entirely so you don’t qualify for any hours at all? In some of the care jobs I’ve worked in, we were effectively forced to sign waiver forms to say that we would work over our maximum hours or else we didn’t get the job. Will employers be able to do the same in this scenario? I have a feeling they will find lots of ways to get round it.
One proposal is for employers to be forced to give reasonable notice of shift changes or cancellations. That is something I could have benefited from over the years. But how much time is reasonable notice? And how will any of this be enforced?
Labour says its new Fair Work Agency will have the bite to clamp down on employers not sticking to the rules. I’m just not sure I believe it will. Labour has also said the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, the National Minimum Wage unit and the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate will be amalgamated into this one new agency. How can we trust this isn’t just a cost-cutting exercise? The government seems to be trying to cut money everywhere else.
The employment rights bill for the time being is only a set of proposals. Knowing the government’s record of reneging on promises, there is no way I’m getting my hopes up. If it does actually make work a bit more secure then that’s good, I suppose. But what about my situation now?
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