Zero-hours contracts: in Cameron's Britain, the dockers' line-up is back Driven by privatisation and corporate muscle, zero-hours casualisation is disastrous for workers, jobs and real recovery

‘This is about household names: 

McDonald's, Boots, Amazon, Abercrombie & Fitch, Cineworld, 

the Tate galleries and Buckingham Palace. 

All rely on zero-hours contracts.' 

Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

The hallmarks of David Cameron's Britain are becoming clearer: payday loans, food banks, the bedroom tax, G4S and now zero-hours contracts. 
Until this week, it was often claimed that zero-hours jobs – the ultimate "flexible labour market" 
fix where employees are tied to a company with no guarantee of work – accounted for only a tiny fraction of the workforce.
Now we know that there are about a million of them – and their numbers are escalating. 
For most, this is 21st-century serfdom: concentrated in low-paid sectors, delivering one-sided flexibility to the employer and insecurity to the worker, with no requirement for holiday, sick or redundancy pay, and imposing wild fluctuations in hours on an often intimidated workforce.

For a minority, they can offer genuine flexible work and even the option of turning jobs down without paying a penalty (though other forms of casual or freelance work are likely to be more attractive). 
For the most part, however, this is a modern version of the dockers' line-up: on-call casual contracts where employees can be barred for working for another employer and still receive no pay. It's scarcely surprising zero-hours workers complain of being "bullied" and "terrified".

Nor is this Victorian-style scheme mainly confined to small firms or seasonal work. 
This is about household names:  
McDonald's, Boots, Amazon, Abercrombie & Fitch, Cineworld, the Tate galleries 
and Buckingham Palace. 
All rely on zero-hours contracts. In the case of Sports Direct, they're used to enforce a two-tier workforce: 90% of its 23,000 workers are on zero-hours deals, while the rest are full-time employees on bonuses of up to £100,000.
Now the zero-hours culture is spreading rapidly throughout the public and voluntary sectors. There are already up to 100,000 workers on zero-hours contracts in the health service. And the large majority of home care workers are forced to operate under these standby contracts – which have also colonised colleges and universities, reducing continuity of support for students and the vulnerable into the bargain.
But zero hours are only one part of a far wider casualisation process that has accelerated since the crash of 2008 and the arrival of the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition. 
Agency working, temporary work and enforced part-time working have all mushroomed: nearly half the jobs created since 2008 have been temporary, as half a million permanent jobs have been lost.
So while ministers and their supporters claim that labour flexibility has kept unemployment at a mere 2.5 million, or about 8% of the workforce, underemployment – including those on part-time or casual contracts who want to work more hours – is 10%.....[...]

 από : http://www.theguardian.com