The UK will most likely have a general election in the spring or autumn of 2024. While crime and ‘law and order’ may become issues, relevant to the private security sector, Labour’s proposed ban on zero-hours contracts also stands to affect the sector. Mark Rowe reports.
Labour’s New Deal for Working People will tackle low-paid, insecure work, including a ban on zero-hours contracts, measures to tackle one-sided flexibility, support for collective bargaining and stronger enforcement of rights and regulation. So says the Labour Party’s ‘Five missions for a better Britain’ document. As that implies, zero-hours contracts (ZHCs for short, see the definition on the website of the conciliation service ACAS) are not so much the problem as their application; and the behaviours of employers.
Leaving aside and politics, and the rights and wrongs of such contracts – Labour plainly sees mileage in promising reform, and the Trades Union Congress and individual unions such as the shopworkers’, Usdaw, have welcomed Labour’s proposals – it’s worth setting out why ZHCs have arisen, in guarding and other services, and yet more generally. And as an aside, ZHCs arose as much during the Labour governments of the 2000s, as since; and investigation of abuses also goes back to Labour, which set up the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA) – and bear in mind that if ZHCs are bad, no contract at all is even worse, outright ‘modern’ slavery (although even slaves can sign contracts). Little considered is that scheduling software allows ZHCs; the chopping up of work into pieces. Let’s consider ZHCs in terms of time, and place.
As for place; take Alton Towers theme park in Staffordshire and the Portmeirion visitor attraction in north Wales, and any number of such. While either site will need a minimum of security even when they’re closed, as Alton Towers is until Saturday, March 16; it probably shuts for midwinter in early November. Portmeirion similarly is ‘out of season’ from early November to March 1. Is anyone proposing that car park attendants and ice cream kiosk staff, litter pickers and so on report for work and be paid in those months?
As for time, any city has a weekly rhythm that requires servicing, including security. Someone with an SIA badge therefore might work a Friday and Saturday night in a pub or night-club; at a football or other stadium as a steward on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon; at an exhibition centre or doing loss prevention in a supermarket on weekdays. Other equivalent service workers will be in kitchens, and serving food and drinks; staffing reception desks. The tradition of working a 40-hour week, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, has long ceased to be the norm. How is a sports stadium, or nightclub, to employ people and offer full-time pay and conditions? The private security sector also has something of a seasonal rhythm; music festivals in midsummer require stewards and patrollers by the hundreds, and specialists such as close protection of VIPs such as the pop singers, one weekend at Glastonbury, one fortnight at Wimbledon tennis, in Edinburgh in August for the surge of cultural visitors and for the Tattoo; and so on.
None of those lends themselves to anything but the ‘gig economy’. So powerful is the idea of ‘gig’ work, that it has entered the language. At the Black Hat Europe show in London in December, one American speaker, a cyber researcher, remarked that he was out of work since the task he had given a joint presentation on, and he was looking for his ‘next gig’. That, in passing, shows that we should not assume that ZHC work is only for the downtrodden, inarticulate, or low-paid.
The National Health Service runs on ‘bank’ work, for security officers as well as nurses, which means the job-holder works ‘as and when’, as one hospital’s advert put it; such as, to fill temporary shortages; although ‘you’ll be a key member of the hospital team’, as another put it. Pub chains, and supermarkets and other retail chains, the care sector, routinely operate according to ZHCs; if that is how a business treats its core staff, why should security or other service providers be any different?
Under a ZHC, you agree to be potentially available for work, and are paid only for the work carried out. The power lies with the employer to identify the worker as an employee, worker (or self-employed), as an evidence review led by the University of Warwick pointed out last month. To quote from the Gospels, Jesus famously asked the Pharisees whether man was made for the Sabbath, or the Sabbath for man. Likewise we may ask; are people made for ZHCs, or are ZHCs made for people?
Like so much in life, it depends. That summer round of festivals and sports events may appeal to carefree students, who might relish the novelty of travelling the country, seeing new places, meeting young people doing likewise. The dashing from one half-day job to another, and forever juggling finances and fretting about not having enough hours of work and pay to make ends meet – and the cost and time of crossing a city for shifts, when an employer could make life easier by giving a full week’s work in one place – would grate on most, certainly for older people with children or elderly parents to care for.
Here may lie answers to the apparent paradox that, so guarding contractors agree, there’s ‘plenty of work to go around’; and yet guard firms will also complain that they are struggling to find guards of the right calibre: trustworthy enough to turn up on time and not to cancel at short notice, or to leave for ten pence an hour more elsewhere, to smile and look interested and not to look down at their phone; and to show some ‘give and take’, when things inevitably crop up and mean extra tasks, or a change of plan and a shorter shifts, or fewer bodies required to carry out the duties. To all that a guard on ZHC may reply that given the uncertainty built into a ZHC, how would the manager like that?
It appears all take from the employer and give from the officer; ZHCs both as a way of an employer avoiding responsibility for paying for holidays, sickness pay, and other benefits; and more subtly an employer making it more difficult for officers to assert their rights, and to seek pay rises (except by leaving for that extra ten pence an hour), because the employer and contractor can pass the buck. The officer, meanwhile, wants to earn enough money to afford a family, and a (decent) place for them to live in. As University of Warwick researchers said last month, ‘we also need to address manager motivation in using these contracts, and associated poor treatment of workers’.
Practically speaking, which regulator is to take on any checking of ZHCs: HM Revenue and Customs, the Health and Safety Executive, or might the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority have its remit (and its name) further extended, into exploitation of those in work?
