You're constantly on the back foot Zero-hours contracts facing flashpoint

Zero-hours contracts facing flashpoint

- Richard Partington

Senior economics correspondent When Seamus Foley took a job on a zero-hours contract at a board game bar in London two years ago, the flexibility it offered was appealing. Now, the deal looks so bad he is prepared to walk out on strike.

"It's exhausting. You're constantly living your life on the back foot," says the employee at Draughts, which has bars in Stratford and Waterloo. There, workers fed up with last-minute rota changes and a lack of basic protections are staging industrial action. He adds: "It feels like all the power is in the hands of the employer."

Foley says he feels as though these kinds of contracts are "designed to keep you desperate, hungry and uncertain."

Almost 1.2 million workers in the UK are on zero-hours contracts. Despite the preparations being made by Keir Starmer's government to ban the use of exploitative arrangements, a key manifesto promise, the zero-hours ranks have swelled since Labour's election victory, rising by more than 100,000 to close to a record high.

Big employers with hundreds of thousands of zero-hours staff between them include McDonald's, Burger King, Dominos and Mike Ashley's Frasers Group, and the contracts are still routinely used in social care, hospitality and logistics.

Workers' rights have been a long-running battle between the government and employers – a row that will intensify once MPs return from recess, amid fierce lobbying to water down Labour's employment rights legislation.

A flashpoint will come in a showdown between ministers and Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers, after the Lords imposed amendments in the final days before the summer break to drastically curtail the bill.

Business groups say the cost of hiring staff has soared under Labour after the chancellor Rachel Reeves's £25bn increase in employer national insurance contributions (NICs) and rise in the "national living wage" were introduced from April.