How low can you go?

All governments profess a keenness to reduce the numbers of unemployed.  All political parties have been seeking to respond to the issue of zero hours. The Tory response to the latter appears to be tied up with the former – encourage employers to see the unemployed as a pool of workers who are so desperate to work they will do so cheaply and trade their job security at the same time.

The Tory alternative to zero hours contracts is euphemistically called ‘Slivers of Time’.

Employers win – they only have to offer workers very short, sub part-time, periods of work.  Some local authorities, including Tory controlled Hammersmith and Fulham have been using it and in 2010 Tesco opened Slivers of Time up to its workforce, allowing employees to work short periods of overtime.

The unemployed and the underemployed (an increasing percentage of the workforce) lose – it amounts to even greater marketisation of the job-seeking process. Most worryingly, it would enable job agencies, or indeed the job-seeker herself, to bid against each other to offer their services at the cheapest possible rate.

Lord Freud, the Minister for Welfare Reform, mentioned that his department was looking into the Sliver idea at a Conservative Party Conference fringe session on welfare, organised by the social research agency NatCen.

Freud is a man with no background in social policy whose CV was previously dominated by leading the floatation of Eurotunnel.  In government he has taken to his welfare cutting task with gusto, spearheading Tory attacks on the Welfare State.  Whilst driving through the Bedroom Tax he commented that Scottish welfare claimants should get a job if they wanted an extra bedroom, he denied in a House of Lords debate that there was any link between the government’s squeeze on benefits and the growth of food banks and most recently he has been pushing through reforms to asbestos compensation where he has been accused of championing the cause of insurers at the expense of asbestos sufferers.

He described Slivers of Time by way of an example:

It is a marketplace for short hours. You would get yourself onto Tesco basic training, so you would be able to work for Tesco. Then Tesco would say “right, we want three hours on Wednesday afternoon – what am I bid?” That group would then say “I’ll do it for £10 an hour, £15 an hour”… whatever, so there would be a marketplace..

A Dutch auction for job seekers’ time was looked at by Labour in government and rejected following a report commissioned by the former welfare minister Margaret Hodge and written by DWP officials.  The report said the government focus was on placing people into real jobs not finding them random hours of work to fill but it seems the concept is now gaining serious traction for wide scale application in the national benefits and job-seeking system as part of the new Universal Credit.

Rather than tackling zero hours’ central tenet – its non existent job security – the Tory led government is seemingly looking to keep that and bolt on a race-to-the-bottom in pay rates. And if marketisation of wages forces people to work at rates below the national minimum wage, such ‘slivers of time’ contracts could potentially be unlawful.

Slivers of Time may well have positive applications in limited circumstances – say for organising community volunteers or for enabling workers who require extra flexibility for child care but want to keep their hand in at work to book ‘slivers’ of work time – but that is on the worker’s own terms. Its integration into a benefits regime that is increasingly based on compulsion, enhances its fundamentally exploitative nature and takes us back to Victorian days of the worker turning up each day and standing around  touting for hire for anything they were ‘lucky enough’ to get.

Victoria Phillips is head of employment rights at Thompsons Solicitors