Zero-hours Contracts

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, my thanks to my noble friend Lady Quin for introducing this topic, and very adequately describing the misery that it can, and does, cause. She spoke of the north-east, but it is a nationwide problem. The other week, we saw before the Select Committee in the other place a major entrepreneur in our area, who was trying to defend completely indefensible practices. The fact that he has also been responsible for the sad decline of a once-great football club adds to the pain, I think, that they must feel in that region.

In a sense, zero-hours contracts are a contradiction in terms. A contract of employment means that the employee provides the labour, and the employer provides the work, and there is a sum exchanged for that. If the employer has no responsibility for providing work, then there is no contract, there is no mutuality.

I want to put it in a rather wider context, like my noble friend Lord Monks, and relate it to some of the events of the past week. This is but one symptom of what is going on in the rough end of the labour market. It applies particularly in areas such as retail, catering and construction, and, of course, agriculture and food. The old form of labour is changing—of permanent contracts; of understanding between employer and employee, with some rights negotiated by trade unions, or if not, at least reflecting the level and structure of permanent employment. There are many areas of our economy where that no longer applies. Yes, for some individuals, flexibility is a good thing. But one person’s flexibility is another person’s exploitation, and in this area exploitation prevails. There is a continuum here: from what appear to be relatively respectable employers, offering sub-standard terms and conditions; through to zero-hours contracts; through to false self-employment; through to dubious agency provision; through to dodgy gangmasters; through to trafficking and the terrible conditions that we have seen in a number of cases up and down our country in recent years. That continuum, in the bottom quartile of the labour market, actually undermines everybody. People may not realise it, but everybody’s terms and conditions are undermined because of what has happened at the bottom end of the market.

My noble friend Lady Quin rightly expressed concern that exit from the EU may reduce workers’ rights. But it is also true that workers’ rights have already been seriously reduced by the degree of undermining of traditional values and understandings within the Labour Party. Low pay and insecurity have been exaggerated and accelerated by these changed forms of employment. At one end—and I raise this as a delicate and difficult problem—this is also related to migration. Not the migration of highly skilled workers, but migrants who are occupied in unskilled jobs, often in gangmaster-type territory or the near equivalent. Those who remember, maybe themselves and certainly their parents, being employed in very different conditions, will have a tendency to blame this on the immigrants and on the way in which employers favour them, because they are prepared to work in those conditions, coming from countries where these traditional standards have not applied.

I have met Members of this House in the last two or three weeks who said—certainly three weeks ago—that they had never met anyone who would vote leave. Even since the referendum, people tell me they cannot understand it. For the section of the employment class that we are now talking about, it is pretty obvious why they voted to leave. Their standards have disappeared, nobody takes much notice of them, and unfortunately, they frequently blame the immigrants, and last week they blamed the EU.

This is a cancer on our society and it is undermining all of us. Some of us, our families and the people we normally socialise with enjoy good working conditions and do not understand or know that this is going on: the only aspect of this we know about is that we employ relatively cheap labour as our builders, nannies and cleaners. Out there, in many parts of the country, pride in work, enjoyment of work and reward from work are disappearing because those standards, those practices, the degree of representation by trade unions and legal standards have been seriously undermined. What we should be blaming is the lack of enforcement of standards across the board, not simply one form of contract, although it is itself deplorable.