The government has revealed that the incidence of the use of zero hour contracts is more than double its previous pronouncement. After a campaign of political pressure by political parties, unions and other employment relations specialists, the government undertook to instruct the Office of National Statistics to revise the criteria used for counting the number of these contracts in operation. The contracts allow employers to hire staff without any obligation to guarantee a minimum or set number of working hours and are widely used in the social care sector, by hotels and many retailers.
Consequently, using the annual Labour Force Survey, the number of workers on these contracts has been established to be 582,935 in 2013. This compares to the stated figures of 250,000 in 2012 and 161,000 in 2011.The Labour Party claimed that a ‘rising tide of insecurity’ in the job market since the last election in 2010 was allowing employers to turn a ‘once marginal and niche element of the labour market’ into the norm.
The Office of National Statistics regulator instructed the organisation to
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