If you're on a "zero-hours contract" with one company, are you allowed to be employed by or on contracts with other companies as well?
What are the consequences of not being available to work when called in on short notice?
In the US we do basically the same thing, but we just call it a part-time job. Very common to be working for 2, 3 or even more different companies on a part-time basis. Is that the case in the UK as well, or is that not a thing?
These were always a disaster. It's essentially trying to 'Uberify' the entire economy. Be your own boss etc...People just end up sitting by the phone waiting for 2 or 3 hours of minimum wage work a day. Maybe this is possible with living with mum and dad as a youngster, or living with a higher earning spouse and looking after children...A normal person could never realistically do them it was a stupid idea to begin with
I was on 0 hour contract with staffing agency when I first arrived to UK until I got my white collar job. It was brilliant concept, I worked as much as I wanted/needed and from my perspective it was like a job that I can work on whenever I wanted which gave me the flexibility to find and prepare for my actual job.
Other people that I worked with were mostly students, Australians(apparently they take a year or two off before/after university to travel Europe and pay for it by working in UK), immigrant doctors/engineers and other professionals in order to pay for their expenses when preparing for their exams in UK so that their qualifications are recognized.
So there's definitely a gist of reality in the advertisement. That said, I knew that I was going to get a proper job and most of the other people were in that mindset so we just made money and had great time but there were some people who did this as their main income and they were forced to move cities when shifts dry out. There were also some people who worked 16 hours a day everyday, making relatively good money but destroying their lives.
It's definitely something that must not be considered long term.
The amount of regulation a company has to comply with to hire and retain a "real" (non-uberised) worker in the UK has been increased to a great degree since the mid 90s. Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment. There is no limit to the number of platforms/firms he can sign on with. If company x provides too few hours or undesirable terms then he can add company y and company z. Uberization is a predictable outcome where hiring risk is increased and assigned solely to the employer.
0-hour contracts have nothing to do with "Uberised" working arrangements, which are essentially a contracted worker. In a 0-hour contract, the worker does not have the freedom to "offer labour without commitment."
- They have an employment contract, so are an employee, not a self-employed contractor.
- There are limitations on who else they could work for.
- In practice, if they're called up to work last-minute, they can't say "no."
For most 0-hour contracts, like retail, trying to setup your employees as self-employed contractors doesn't work because it's a blatant violation of the law. HMRC will come after you for employer's NI as you have disguised employees.
Uber is a very different model because the way they setup the working arrangements allows them to keep taxi drivers outside the scope of disguised employees.
It seems that you're framing it as if regulation is some random burden that appeared out of nowhere rather than a defence mechanism that emerged because businesses repeatedly abused workers, cut corners, and pushed costs onto everyone else whenever they were allowed to.
Work, technology, supply chains, data, health and safety, and the whole economy are all far more complex than they were in the 90s, of course regulation increased: we had to adjust to respond to the new challenges and everything else. It increased because the damage companies can do increased significantly too (we are literally discussing about existential threats to humanity and life on earth in the last few years), and because we learned again and again what happens when you leave everything to "the market" and trust firms to self-police.
Also, this idea that gig work is some balanced freedom on both sides sounds nice in theory but falls apart in practice. I'd go as far as saying that it's naive. The company/platform keeps the power, sets the terms, and the worker carries the instability and everything that derives from that. "You can sign up to multiple apps" is not a real solution to insecure income, it's just telling people to juggle several unreliable income streams at once and hope enough scraps appear each week. And whereas for businesses "losing" means lower profits or no profits (with the worst case scenario being that they have to shut down), for workers this can mean huge financial insecurity, depression, lack of control, and potential destitution. I'd say the latter is markedly more dramatic.
Put differently, it's not meaningful flexibility for most people, more like risk transfer. The business gets labour on demand without commitment, while the worker still has rent, bills, and food costs arriving on a fixed schedule and with the threat of actual death if they end up homeless in the winter.
And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms? If a company depends on labour to function, employing people properly is not some unfair punishment - it's part of the cost of doing business in a civilised society. The only reason private enterprise is tolerated at all is that it is supposed to produce a social benefit. If a business model only works by making workers permanently disposable and pushing insecurity onto society, then that is a criticism of the business model, not of regulation. And it's probably not worth keeping the private sector either.
Zero our contracts is used far beyond the "Uber"-style gig work where people can choose when they want to work. Often its used in for any sort of minimum wage job where there is a significant imbalance where employers have the power to offer as little/much work as they want and penalise workers who can't/won't take those shifts.
Unfortunately the UK now has an economy which is 83% services vs around 50% in 1970. Services are much more volatile with less certainty than say manufacturing or primary industry. So employment in services is going to be volatile and hard to predict, certainty has declined for all, employers and workers. A given employer only has the power if he is the only, or one of just a few in town. If not then the worker has the opportunity to seek hours somewhere else from someone else, at least if these jobs/gigs are relatively unskilled, which most are.
What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies". A barista in London may be offered £21K per year to work all his shifts (I'm looking at a job ad), yet needs double that to live, so government "subsidises" the employer by providing the other "missing" £20K in universal credit, housing benefit, and so on. It's no wonder employers take advantage of this.
Meanwhile the customer thinks his coffee costs him £3, in fact the true cost is a multiple of that because of the ~£20K "subsidy". Meanwhile you can hear the faint sound of laughter, which is the employer, knowing that the taxpayer is picking up half his true wage bill.
>What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies".
Wait a second, Isn't this just corporate welfare and goes against capitalism and supply/demand free market economics? Why should other people's taxes subsidize other people's businesses?
We're not talking about subsidizing national security industries like semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, renewables, pharma, we're talking about subsidizing someone's cafe/fast food business so they as a business owner can pocket the profits while paying their staff below market and having the taxpayer pick up the tab.
For largely unskilled service sector jobs, where one might consider the worker relatively interchangeable, it is particularly bad if your government also has an "infinite immigration" policy in practice.[1]
[1] Inward migration to the UK was 1.3M people in the year to June 2023. UK population was about 67/68M at the time.
If this is the reason (I don’t believe it personally) then there should be no problem with an outright ban on non-compete agreements for zero-hour contracts. Somehow I don’t think employers will agree.
Non-compete agreements (or any clause restricting working elsewhere) are generally not enforceable in UK zero-hours contracts. Explicitly since January 2016, and in practice before then.[1]
> Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment.
This is basically a cousin to “at-will” hiring rationalization in the US. It’s nonsense in that case, and it’s nonsense with zero hour contracts. There is a little to no benefit to employees. It just puts them in an even more precarious situation. The power dynamics are not fair between them and employers, those kinds of systems are inherently lopsided. Yet proponents keep insisting it levels the playing field. I don’t get it.
It’s basically arguing for the fusion of worst parts of being a hired employee and a freelance contractor. Both have advantages, both have compromises, and these “gig economy” jobs make sure that basically none of the benefits of being a contractor exist.
Uberify? Funny, I continually tell people I refuse to use Uber because of its labour policies and it fails to register for them. I have never used Uber, Deliveroo or Just Eat which are trashy, exploitative companies.
This is a tremendous opportunity for the capitalists and industrialists to dodge their obligations towards normal employees. Essentially outsource their costs, healthcare, pension, unemployment etc employee protections to the working class while additionally driving down the wages. They profit and the rest of the society (Ie the tax payers that still remain) have to shoulder the cost.
A labour union in Finland interviewed some Wolt gig workers and found that after discounting for time waited for delivery and expenses their effective take home pay was around 2.5€ per hour.
We can expect this to spread more and more from taxis and delivery service to wider spectrums.
It makes no sense for these to be the responsibility of a buyer. Let people buy and sell products and services, and let the government collect tax and provide subsidies.
The UK is poor and getting poorer every year. People simply don’t start companies there. Making the labor market even worse isn’t going to fix the structural issues that are reducing living standards year after year
>the number of employing businesses decreasing by 9,000 (0.7%), but the number of non-employing businesses rising by 201,000 (4.9%)
Isn't "non-employing business" an euphemism of sorts for "Uber driver"? No idea though if the UK is already forcing Uber to hire drivers and couriers as employees or not yet.
I am self employed electrician in Germany. I will never ever hire someone due to sick regulations here. I can work with clothing and tools I want. I can use my old stable ladder. For my employee I must get very expensive hardware and be liable for his work and his health. So thanks, it will never happen. I work all the time with other self employed people and they do share same opinion.
"Instead, employers will likely increase their reliance on temporary workers with fixed-term contracts"
It's no quick fix. The new six month (previously two year) unfair dismissal rules from January 2027 already impact annual fixed term contracts. As the end of a fixed term contract is legally a "dismissal", it'll be necessary to go through the full process.
I suspect some low-level service industry employers will sense the weakness of the jobs market and increase employee turnover by giving people contracts of under six months then rinse and repeat from the queue of applicants, which would suck for someone who wants a temporary job for a year or two like students.
The entire situation where you have great rights for “permanent” workers but nothing but precarity for so called “temporary” workers has been a disaster in Europe. It creates an entire underclass, even for people in high paying jobs. It was easier to get a mortgage, etc. in the US as an at-will employee who could be fired at any time than it was as a worker on a temp contract in Europe, in part because at least in the US there was a level playing field.
I realise the UK isn’t in the EU but it is part of the broader trend of creating a privileged class of permanent workers over all others.
This also increases friction in the labour market since changing jobs means likely giving up a permanent contract.
The main reason for this was employers could cut your hours if they had a poor month and needed to balance the books. Which is understandable for smaller businesses. Then the bigger companies went nuts with it and ended up massively changing the dynamics of work.
This change should go further in killing off the zombie companies that exist which means another spike in the unemployment rates. Coupled with the figures on the UK topping AI replacement of workers charts things are looking really grim.
The UK desperately needs a functioning angel and VC culture to absorb this but it looks like the cart has bolted before the horse.
Zero-hours contracts probably started as a pragmatic tool for genuinely small, volatile businesses, but they scaled into something very different when large employers adopted them systematically
In the UK it is very much survival of the fittest except you are competing against everyone in the world. If you can't manage that competition you will inevitably be pushed out of London or any of the major cities and very quickly find yourself at the bottom of the social ladder. The UK is a free for all and naturally more people have become exploitive or desperate because of it.
One of the most interesting government charts (to me at least) is the "Net fiscal balance by geographic region" one from the ONS[1] (Figure 8).
Spoiler: London and to a much lesser extent, the SE, are the only regions with positive net fiscal balance at all. A sorry state of affairs.
London is probably the most subsidised part of the UK although it pretends to be the opposite. It does produce vast amounts of money but also because its infrastructure etc is maintained and it is constantly promoted via the TV etc.
If you're on a "zero-hours contract" with one company, are you allowed to be employed by or on contracts with other companies as well?
What are the consequences of not being available to work when called in on short notice?
In the US we do basically the same thing, but we just call it a part-time job. Very common to be working for 2, 3 or even more different companies on a part-time basis. Is that the case in the UK as well, or is that not a thing?
These were always a disaster. It's essentially trying to 'Uberify' the entire economy. Be your own boss etc...People just end up sitting by the phone waiting for 2 or 3 hours of minimum wage work a day. Maybe this is possible with living with mum and dad as a youngster, or living with a higher earning spouse and looking after children...A normal person could never realistically do them it was a stupid idea to begin with
> Be your own boss etc..
I was on 0 hour contract with staffing agency when I first arrived to UK until I got my white collar job. It was brilliant concept, I worked as much as I wanted/needed and from my perspective it was like a job that I can work on whenever I wanted which gave me the flexibility to find and prepare for my actual job.
Other people that I worked with were mostly students, Australians(apparently they take a year or two off before/after university to travel Europe and pay for it by working in UK), immigrant doctors/engineers and other professionals in order to pay for their expenses when preparing for their exams in UK so that their qualifications are recognized.
So there's definitely a gist of reality in the advertisement. That said, I knew that I was going to get a proper job and most of the other people were in that mindset so we just made money and had great time but there were some people who did this as their main income and they were forced to move cities when shifts dry out. There were also some people who worked 16 hours a day everyday, making relatively good money but destroying their lives.
It's definitely something that must not be considered long term.
The amount of regulation a company has to comply with to hire and retain a "real" (non-uberised) worker in the UK has been increased to a great degree since the mid 90s. Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment. There is no limit to the number of platforms/firms he can sign on with. If company x provides too few hours or undesirable terms then he can add company y and company z. Uberization is a predictable outcome where hiring risk is increased and assigned solely to the employer.
0-hour contracts have nothing to do with "Uberised" working arrangements, which are essentially a contracted worker. In a 0-hour contract, the worker does not have the freedom to "offer labour without commitment."
- They have an employment contract, so are an employee, not a self-employed contractor.
- There are limitations on who else they could work for.
- In practice, if they're called up to work last-minute, they can't say "no."
For most 0-hour contracts, like retail, trying to setup your employees as self-employed contractors doesn't work because it's a blatant violation of the law. HMRC will come after you for employer's NI as you have disguised employees.
Uber is a very different model because the way they setup the working arrangements allows them to keep taxi drivers outside the scope of disguised employees.
It seems that you're framing it as if regulation is some random burden that appeared out of nowhere rather than a defence mechanism that emerged because businesses repeatedly abused workers, cut corners, and pushed costs onto everyone else whenever they were allowed to.
Work, technology, supply chains, data, health and safety, and the whole economy are all far more complex than they were in the 90s, of course regulation increased: we had to adjust to respond to the new challenges and everything else. It increased because the damage companies can do increased significantly too (we are literally discussing about existential threats to humanity and life on earth in the last few years), and because we learned again and again what happens when you leave everything to "the market" and trust firms to self-police.
Also, this idea that gig work is some balanced freedom on both sides sounds nice in theory but falls apart in practice. I'd go as far as saying that it's naive. The company/platform keeps the power, sets the terms, and the worker carries the instability and everything that derives from that. "You can sign up to multiple apps" is not a real solution to insecure income, it's just telling people to juggle several unreliable income streams at once and hope enough scraps appear each week. And whereas for businesses "losing" means lower profits or no profits (with the worst case scenario being that they have to shut down), for workers this can mean huge financial insecurity, depression, lack of control, and potential destitution. I'd say the latter is markedly more dramatic.
Put differently, it's not meaningful flexibility for most people, more like risk transfer. The business gets labour on demand without commitment, while the worker still has rent, bills, and food costs arriving on a fixed schedule and with the threat of actual death if they end up homeless in the winter.
And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms? If a company depends on labour to function, employing people properly is not some unfair punishment - it's part of the cost of doing business in a civilised society. The only reason private enterprise is tolerated at all is that it is supposed to produce a social benefit. If a business model only works by making workers permanently disposable and pushing insecurity onto society, then that is a criticism of the business model, not of regulation. And it's probably not worth keeping the private sector either.
Zero our contracts is used far beyond the "Uber"-style gig work where people can choose when they want to work. Often its used in for any sort of minimum wage job where there is a significant imbalance where employers have the power to offer as little/much work as they want and penalise workers who can't/won't take those shifts.
Unfortunately the UK now has an economy which is 83% services vs around 50% in 1970. Services are much more volatile with less certainty than say manufacturing or primary industry. So employment in services is going to be volatile and hard to predict, certainty has declined for all, employers and workers. A given employer only has the power if he is the only, or one of just a few in town. If not then the worker has the opportunity to seek hours somewhere else from someone else, at least if these jobs/gigs are relatively unskilled, which most are.
What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies". A barista in London may be offered £21K per year to work all his shifts (I'm looking at a job ad), yet needs double that to live, so government "subsidises" the employer by providing the other "missing" £20K in universal credit, housing benefit, and so on. It's no wonder employers take advantage of this.
Meanwhile the customer thinks his coffee costs him £3, in fact the true cost is a multiple of that because of the ~£20K "subsidy". Meanwhile you can hear the faint sound of laughter, which is the employer, knowing that the taxpayer is picking up half his true wage bill.
>What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies".
Wait a second, Isn't this just corporate welfare and goes against capitalism and supply/demand free market economics? Why should other people's taxes subsidize other people's businesses?
We're not talking about subsidizing national security industries like semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, renewables, pharma, we're talking about subsidizing someone's cafe/fast food business so they as a business owner can pocket the profits while paying their staff below market and having the taxpayer pick up the tab.
Capitalism is not a sincerely held belief. The true belief is “my business, at the expense of yours.”
> penalise workers who can't/won't take those shifts.
Wouldn't this problem better solved with a normal contract that obliges the worker to take the shifts the employer is interested in?
I think this is true for a certain category of worker, but it depends heavily on whether the flexibility is actually symmetrical in practice
For largely unskilled service sector jobs, where one might consider the worker relatively interchangeable, it is particularly bad if your government also has an "infinite immigration" policy in practice.[1]
[1] Inward migration to the UK was 1.3M people in the year to June 2023. UK population was about 67/68M at the time.
If this is the reason (I don’t believe it personally) then there should be no problem with an outright ban on non-compete agreements for zero-hour contracts. Somehow I don’t think employers will agree.
Non-compete agreements (or any clause restricting working elsewhere) are generally not enforceable in UK zero-hours contracts. Explicitly since January 2016, and in practice before then.[1]
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/zero-hours-contra... (Bottom para.)
> Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment.
This is basically a cousin to “at-will” hiring rationalization in the US. It’s nonsense in that case, and it’s nonsense with zero hour contracts. There is a little to no benefit to employees. It just puts them in an even more precarious situation. The power dynamics are not fair between them and employers, those kinds of systems are inherently lopsided. Yet proponents keep insisting it levels the playing field. I don’t get it.
It’s basically arguing for the fusion of worst parts of being a hired employee and a freelance contractor. Both have advantages, both have compromises, and these “gig economy” jobs make sure that basically none of the benefits of being a contractor exist.
“Right to work”, in the US, is about being able to work for an employer without joining the employee union.
“At will” employment is the term you are thinking of.
Yes thank you I always do that!
Sounds horrifying and you should feel bad for even writing that.
Emergent properties of skewed incentive systems is not the author’s responsibility.
Uberify? Funny, I continually tell people I refuse to use Uber because of its labour policies and it fails to register for them. I have never used Uber, Deliveroo or Just Eat which are trashy, exploitative companies.
This is a tremendous opportunity for the capitalists and industrialists to dodge their obligations towards normal employees. Essentially outsource their costs, healthcare, pension, unemployment etc employee protections to the working class while additionally driving down the wages. They profit and the rest of the society (Ie the tax payers that still remain) have to shoulder the cost.
A labour union in Finland interviewed some Wolt gig workers and found that after discounting for time waited for delivery and expenses their effective take home pay was around 2.5€ per hour.
We can expect this to spread more and more from taxis and delivery service to wider spectrums.
> costs, healthcare, pension, unemployment etc employee protections
It makes no sense for these to be the responsibility of a buyer. Let people buy and sell products and services, and let the government collect tax and provide subsidies.
The UK is poor and getting poorer every year. People simply don’t start companies there. Making the labor market even worse isn’t going to fix the structural issues that are reducing living standards year after year
That claim doesn't hold up to the figures: https://www.smeweb.com/total-number-of-uk-businesses-rises-d...
>the number of employing businesses decreasing by 9,000 (0.7%), but the number of non-employing businesses rising by 201,000 (4.9%)
Isn't "non-employing business" an euphemism of sorts for "Uber driver"? No idea though if the UK is already forcing Uber to hire drivers and couriers as employees or not yet.
I am self employed electrician in Germany. I will never ever hire someone due to sick regulations here. I can work with clothing and tools I want. I can use my old stable ladder. For my employee I must get very expensive hardware and be liable for his work and his health. So thanks, it will never happen. I work all the time with other self employed people and they do share same opinion.
Most of the fall in living standards since 2016 can be attributed solely to one thing: Brexit.
"Instead, employers will likely increase their reliance on temporary workers with fixed-term contracts"
It's no quick fix. The new six month (previously two year) unfair dismissal rules from January 2027 already impact annual fixed term contracts. As the end of a fixed term contract is legally a "dismissal", it'll be necessary to go through the full process.
I suspect some low-level service industry employers will sense the weakness of the jobs market and increase employee turnover by giving people contracts of under six months then rinse and repeat from the queue of applicants, which would suck for someone who wants a temporary job for a year or two like students.
The entire situation where you have great rights for “permanent” workers but nothing but precarity for so called “temporary” workers has been a disaster in Europe. It creates an entire underclass, even for people in high paying jobs. It was easier to get a mortgage, etc. in the US as an at-will employee who could be fired at any time than it was as a worker on a temp contract in Europe, in part because at least in the US there was a level playing field.
I realise the UK isn’t in the EU but it is part of the broader trend of creating a privileged class of permanent workers over all others.
This also increases friction in the labour market since changing jobs means likely giving up a permanent contract.
The main reason for this was employers could cut your hours if they had a poor month and needed to balance the books. Which is understandable for smaller businesses. Then the bigger companies went nuts with it and ended up massively changing the dynamics of work.
This change should go further in killing off the zombie companies that exist which means another spike in the unemployment rates. Coupled with the figures on the UK topping AI replacement of workers charts things are looking really grim.
The UK desperately needs a functioning angel and VC culture to absorb this but it looks like the cart has bolted before the horse.
Zero-hours contracts probably started as a pragmatic tool for genuinely small, volatile businesses, but they scaled into something very different when large employers adopted them systematically
>The UK desperately needs a functioning angel and VC culture
That is like the last thing they need. Functioning unions and collective bargining is the proven way to combat this.
From far away it sounds like they need both. Stronger businesses that make more money, and stronger unions to ensure the money is shared.
This feels like one of those policies where the intent makes sense, but the second-order effects are going to matter a lot
In the UK it is very much survival of the fittest except you are competing against everyone in the world. If you can't manage that competition you will inevitably be pushed out of London or any of the major cities and very quickly find yourself at the bottom of the social ladder. The UK is a free for all and naturally more people have become exploitive or desperate because of it.
Not living in a major city puts you at the bottom of the social ladder? Wow.
A lot of people living outside major cities seem to have a better quality of live than those in them.
It is where most of the economic activity is. Many parts of the UK are poor.
One of the most interesting government charts (to me at least) is the "Net fiscal balance by geographic region" one from the ONS[1] (Figure 8). Spoiler: London and to a much lesser extent, the SE, are the only regions with positive net fiscal balance at all. A sorry state of affairs.
[1]https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe... Figure 8.
London is probably the most subsidised part of the UK although it pretends to be the opposite. It does produce vast amounts of money but also because its infrastructure etc is maintained and it is constantly promoted via the TV etc.