Zero Hours Contracts Bill

Debate between Paul Flynn and Ian Mearns

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ian Mearns]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. I repeat that if we really want to care for the most vulnerable in our society, we should have people in professional positions doing so on a regular basis. The familiarity of seeing the same person time and again is the bedrock of a care system.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend aware of the Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Bill, which is going through the other place at the moment? It has been described as “utter tosh” by the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), the previous Attorney-General, and is designed to increase the number of volunteers. The big society seems to be an idea whose time has gone. The Bill is designed to push people not into zero-hours contracts, but into zero-pay contracts.

[Ian Mearns]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. I have the greatest admiration for many people up and down the country who devote their time freely to volunteering for a whole range of charitable and local causes. At the same time, however, I detest the fact that those volunteers are replacing full-time, paid jobs, because that is not good for the local economy.

My Bill states that if someone has been in a job for 12 weeks, they will become a regular employee entitled to a fixed and regular-hours contract with all the conditions of service that go with it. We will not prosper as a society or grow the type of economy we need as long as more than 1 million workers go to sleep at night not knowing whether they will have the much-needed earnings from the next morning’s shift. The Bill would allow workers to escape from the financial limbo in which many of them find themselves.

The Bill states that if someone’s employer requests or requires them to work without giving reasonable notice of three days, they should be paid time and a half for a shift ordered within those three days. It also states that if their employer cancels their shift at the last minute, they should not be plunged into financial instability but paid in full for the period in question.

That will take a measure of improved work force and production planning by employers, but that is not a bad thing in itself; it is actually good for companies to rationalise the way in which they engage people. The Bill would return a degree of mutuality and fairness to the employment arrangements with which many of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society find themselves.

I am delighted that Labour Front Benchers have pledged to stamp out the abuse of zero-hours contracts when they are elected to government in 2015, but I do not believe that underpaid, insecure, zero-hours contract workers—our constituents—should have to wait until then.

People outside this place see zero-hours contracts for what they are: Victorian-era employment practices that have no place in a modern, 21st-century economy. Those employed on them know only too well what a zero-hours contract means: low pay, insecure work and zero rights in the workplace. If the Government will not support our plans, it will yet again fall to a Labour Government to protect the interests of ordinary working people doing a decent day’s work in workplaces up and down this nation.