At this year’s Trade Unions Congress, Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, outlined his party’s plans if elected to government in 2015 to regulate the use of zero-hours contracts. This came just after the Unite union revealed that research commissioned by it showed that up to 5.5m workers may be employed on these contracts which guarantee no set work or income. Further, the TUC agreed to hold a number of different weekday days of action against austerity (on November 5) and against the use of blacklisting (union members) by employers (on November 20). (Ref. 130537)
Debates continue over zero-hour contracts. Unite claimed that employers were using the contracts to avoid granting zero hours staff full employment rights such as sick pay and holiday pay. Although Miliband’s commitment stops short of an outright ban on these controversial contracts (see article No. 130514), he stated that anyone working for a single employer for more than 12 weeks on a zero-hours contract would automatically be given the right to a full-time contract based on the average time
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