A quick post with some quick stats that I stumbled across this morning. From the Office for National Statistics website:
“Number of people employed on a “zero-hours contract” in their main job was 697,000 for October to December 2014…”
That’s nearly 700,000 people on contracts where the work is not guaranteed and they have an insecure income and, of course, zero employment rights (they are “zero” in terms of more than just hours). Effectively, these people are not employed as we know it. They are neither full-time nor part-time. They have work purely when the employer deigns to instruct them to work – often at very short notice (I know, I’ve worked in retail in a management role and know exactly how it works). So, it seems reasonable to me to package up the zero hour contracts with the figures for unemployment, because they aren’t employed in any real sense.
The latest employment figures suggest that 1.91m people are unemployed. If we tack on the zero hours contracts, we get a grand total of 2.6m unemployed (ok, let’s call it underemployed, or 2.6m people not fully employed). But if we have to do this for the Coalition period, we also have to do this for the period immediately before they came to office. You know, to be fair and all that (we all know Cameron likes to bore on about fairness).
In May 2010, when the Coalition was formed, unemployment stood at 2.48m. According to the (revised) figures from the ONS, there were approximately 190,000 zero hour contracts [PDF] in 2009 (last full year of the Labour government) and 168,000 in 2010 (the first year of the Coalition). If we split the difference and say that there were 179,000 zero hour contracts, and add it to the unemployment figure for May 2010, we get…a grand total of 2.6m unemployed/underemployed/not fully employed. So the figure is unchanged.
Despite the rhetoric from the Coalition (and particularly the Tories), the employment situation has remain largely unchanged in the sense that there are still 2.6m people in this country who are not full employed in the sense that they have stable hours, a stable income and proper employment rights. The only significant difference is that increasing numbers of people are being forced off the social security that they have been paying into, and into insecure employment. Well, that seems fair doesn’t it?