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Two-tier nation: the North West economy & zero hour contracts

Posted by Kate Green, MP for Stretford and Urmston, at 14:16, Thu 12 September 2013:

I can’t believe the audacity of the government’s claims that they’ve got it right on the economy.

It really doesn’t feel like that to ordinary households trying to manage on tight budgets.

It certainly doesn’t feel like it here in the north west.

What’s becoming crystal clear is that we’re more than ever a two-tier nation. Yesterday’s unemployment figures showed a (welcome) fall of 24,000 in the last quarter across the country as a whole.

But in the north west – and in the north east, Yorkshire and the Humber, the west Midlands, the east of England and Scotland, unemployment rose.

In half the country - in the north – things are getting worse.

Even those in work are finding the going tough. Real wages fell again, by £12 a week. Nearly 1.5 million people are working parttime simply because they can’t find fulltime work, and struggling on low pay. And there’s a real scandal about zero hours contracts (which come with absolutely no guarantee of work at all), with official figures seriously under-stating the number of people forced into this sort of employment.

I’m particularly disgusted at these zero hours contracts. They offer absolutely no job or income security. They strip away the dignity of those who are just desperate to work.

Some of the stories I’ve heard are a disgrace. Care workers told they’ll be paid for the 15 minutes (15 minutes! You can’t provide much care in that time) that they spend with each client, but not the time they spend travelling between appointments. People who’ve been given just three hours work in the past month, but told they’ll be in breach of contract if they work for any other employer; they’re simply expected to stay on standby - unpaid.

How can people possibly manage like that? How can manage your budget when you’ve no idea how much you’ll have coming in from one day to the next? How can you possibly set money aside to ensure you can meet monthly bills? How do you pay for lumpy items, like new school uniforms, or a pair of shoes, or repairing a broken window? And how do you feel when you’re told yet again, having got yourself up in the morning, got yourself dressed and out to work, that you’re not needed thanks, and just to go home.

That’s what used to happen to my grandfather, looking for work in the Glasgow shipyards back in the 1920s and ‘30s, queuing up on a Monday morning to see if he’d be one of the lucky ones offered work that week. I thought we’d left all that behind. It was a shameful way to treat working people, creating devastating poverty, anxiety and a sense of utter humiliation and failure.

But it seems the Tory-led government think it’s ok for employers to behave like that today.

Labour absolutely doesn’t think it’s ok to treat people in this way. This week, Ed Miliband pledged that a Labour Government would ban employers from insisting zero-hours workers be available even when there is no guarantee of any work; stop zero-hours contracts that require workers to work exclusively for one business; and end the shameful misuse of zero-hours contracts, where employees are in practice working regular hours over a sustained period but aren’t given a proper contract and employment rights.

I’m in favour of some flexibility in the way people work – to enable them to balance work and family life. But I’m absolutely not in favour of flexibility that in reality means people facing job insecurity, and having to be ‘flexible’ about whether they can afford the weekly shop.