a post by Daniel Tomlinson for the Resolution Foundation blog
After five years of rapid increases, the number of people working on a zero hours contract has flat-lined in the UK over the past year. A tighter labour market may not yet be delivering increases in real pay, but it is slowly reshaping the type of work that we do for the better.
It’s also welcome that today’s employment statistics show that it’s not just the use of zero hours contracts (ZHCs) that has plateaued – the numbers of people working as self-employed, part-time and as agency workers have all stopped rising over recent months.
But atypical employment is still too high. There are over 900,000 people working on a ZHCand over 800,000 people working as agency workers (up 25 per cent compared to pre-crisis levels). Part-time work is also elevated, accounting for a notably larger share of employment than it did before the crisis.
With all of these forms of work there will be an array of experiences – for some, atypical work is a good way to spend a semi-retirement or to grab some extra hours between university terms. For others, however, this work is less positive – recent Resolution Foundation research found that over a quarter of men working in low-paid part-time work wanted to work more hours than they currently did.
What of ZHC workers? Who are they and how do they feel about the hours they work? Well, today [21 February] the ONS has published a suite of statistics focusing particularly on zero-hours contract workers. Newly buried in the big quarterly data release these fascinating numbers are now easy to miss, so it seems worthwhile to spell out some of the most important findings from today’s data deluge.
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