Weekly Poll Lowdown

Well it seems after calls last week from the UK opposition, only before they found out that councils controlled by Labour employ people on 'zero contract hours', you agree that zero contract hours should be abolished. Just over half of think this should be the case and this is pretty much dead on what the public thought when polled about it last week. So well done for being highly representative.

Should 'zero hour contracts' be abolished?

Yes.	53%
No.	38%
Unsure.	9%

Total votes: 34

I think getting rid of zero contact hours is a stupid idea because it gets rid of economic freedom of both employers and also of employees. 

 Its not just Sports Direct that uses zero hour contracts, the NHS, caring businesses, Charities and most government departments use them too.

Firstly, just so everyone is clear about this, a zero hour contract is where a person is employed but there isn't an amount of set hours they do. The business would call up a person and say 'can you do X amount of hours at this time' and the employee can accept or decline to do it. Zero contract hour workers are subject to other employment legislations because the law sees them as employees and not just workers. Also as another side point, it's not just big business who use zero contract hours. 24% of those who are on a zero hour contract work in the public sector and 34% work for charities. 

The idea behind zero hour contracts have been around for a very a very long time. It's essentially to give flexibility for businesses and staff. People are able to work for as much as they want because they individually want to be flexible. For example those who can only physically work short hours or want the potential of more money than a 9-5 job often use Zero hour contracts.

Employers too have the bonus of being able to have more staff when needed without having to spend lots of money on longer contracts. Indeed if zero contract hour jobs did not exist it is debatable that they would be replaced by full time jobs as the cost would be too great, especially true in small a medium size business because they have less money.

  

 Vince Cable wants tighter regulation of the zero hour contracts because people are willingly working on them and its up to him to decide what people should do.

So what is the cumulative effect for employers and employees, let's forget the obvious benefits to the consumer at this time? Well people who would otherwise be unemployed have a job because it's cheap enough for employers to provide positions for labour. Therefore employees have more choice about what job they can do, and that's on top of the flexibility they get in accepting the work when asked to do it. Employers too get a benefit of potentially saving costs and gaining productivity. This in turns creates more money for them and then leads to an expansion with more jobs and so there are even more people employed, which is what people want at the moment.

 People on the left don't actually realise that people just want to work to have more control over their lives. Employees are winners from their trade of labour too.

So what is all this nonsense about? It comes from two ideas espoused by the loony left of the UK. Firstly that somehow everyone is entitled to full employment. These are the sort of Marxist ideas that Owen Jones espouses which ends up with the country being bankrupt and no one in employment. This hasn't been peddled in the media because it doesn't make sense, but be sure that many of the hard core lefties who bring these to light believe in this. 

A much more used argument then is that people are not getting enough hours to work and therefore can't afford to live, a classic case of oppression of the working population by the 'evil' capitalists. However, only 16% of zero contract workers in research done by the CPID 'felt they did not have an opportunity to work enough hours', which is pretty low and also highly subjective on 'enough'. But even if it were the case that people on zero contract hours were struggling to get by as the norm they would not be getting by at all if they did not have any jobs. Then again we could always have these people on benefits, perhaps that's what the lefties want? They're not interested in jobs for people only to have voters stuck in a situation where they have little freedom and rely on the state letting them live. We already know that the lefties in the Guardian just want to control people's lives, this may just be another way about it.

 The lefties just don't want people choosing to improve their lives by earning money.

Vote in the new poll on the sidebar.