The United Kingdom's new Labour Party government has put into place one of its campaign promises and said during its first year in office it will ban the employment practice of zero-hours contracts.
This is a good idea.
There are arguments from some that such contracts, which offer no assured hours of work and therefore no pay, allow people greater flexibility to accept or not accept work.
The arguments on both sides sound plausible, but with many things the devil is in the details.
For supporters, the contracts create jobs that might not otherwise exist for employees who have control over their present and future.
Those who do not like them argue that those jobs have very little quality to them and those who sign the contracts actually do not have any flexibility, because if someone is asked to work, likely they do so with the hope of being asked again.
Say no, and one might be struck off.
Such contracts are part of the so-called gig economy, and few offer any employment rights such as sick, injury and vacation pay.
According to a May 2017 report from the Office for National Statistics, “the hospitality industry employs 22% of the 905,000 (zero-hours) staff, amounting to 11.6% of its total workforce.”
At the time, then-prime minister Theresa May, from the Conservative Party, said she would review the practice, but nothing happened.
In May 2024, just before the General Election was called by the last Conservative Party prime minister, Rishi Sunak, the ONS said 1.03 million people in the U.K. — or 3.1% of the working population — were on zero-hours contacts,
Hotels and hospitality employees are not broken out of the data specifically, but the May 2024 data showed of those in zero-hours contracts, 20.3% of them were in the “caring, leisure and other service occupations” category, which includes hotels.
The highest percentage of the total working population in these contracts came in April-to-June 2023, when the level was 3.7%.
Labour officials also have said they will end such strategies as “fire and rehire” and would give added protection for those on maternal or paternal leave and those suffering from long-term sickness.
Another practice that many people consider unfair and perilous is the leasehold structure on residential properties. This is the practice where mortgage holders own the property they buy but not the ground underneath it and, in some cases, the outside walls and shell.
Leasehold owners pay a ground rent to the landowner, which sometimes is a peppercorn rate, but in some cases can become an onerous charge that have ended in a situation of minus equity, which becomes a life-altering situation.
If that practice is outlawed, then would not house prices rise up to the market price of freehold or share of freehold homes, where the owner owns everything or can set up a limited liability company that they co-own and manage?
The devil is in the details, and who knows what will happen to these zero-hours jobs?
Would they disappear completely?
Businesses might need to reevaluate their staffing levels.
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