UK ban on zero-hours contracts ‘to include agency workers’

Agency workers will reportedly be included in a ban on “exploitative” zero-hours contracts as part of changes to the UK government’s employment bill.

Under the new rules, employers will have to offer agency workers a contract that guarantees a minimum number of hours every week, the BBC reported.

Agency workers who choose to be on zero-hours contracts will be eligible for compensation if their shifts are changed at short notice.

It is one of a number of amendments to the government’s employment rights bill, which will be presented on Tuesday. Labour has promised repeatedly to ban “exploitative zero-hours contracts”.

According to the BBC, the government still has to decide whether the minimum hours offered in a contract to agency workers will be based on a 12-week reference period or longer.

More than 1 million people in the UK are working on a zero-hours contract basis, in areas ranging from hospitality and warehouses to the NHS. Hundreds of thousands of them are on zero-hours contracts despite working for the same employer for years, according to the TUC.

Unions have campaigned for the inclusion of agency workers in the ban, arguing that employers could get around the ban on zero-hours contracts by hiring agency workers instead. There are about 900,000 agency workers in the UK.

However, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation is concerned that the change should not “undermine” the flexibility that zero-hours contracts offer some people.

Big recruiters and staffing companies including Hays, Adecco and Manpower wrote to the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, saying that the new rules were “unworkable”. They said in December the rules would lead to lower levels of hiring, and more work being delayed or carried out by people taken on as self-employed.

Under the changes in the employment rights bill, parents in Britain will be granted a right to bereavement leave after suffering a miscarriage, the Guardian revealed.

Mothers and their partners will be given the right to two weeks of bereavement leave if they have suffered a pregnancy loss before 24 weeks’ gestation.

The reforms will also allow 1.3 million of the lowest-paid UK workers will be guaranteed sick pay worth up to 80% of their weekly salary from the first day of sickness.

The UK has one of the stingiest rates of statutory sick pay in the developed world, according to the Resolution Foundation. People earning less than £123 a week are not entitled to anything. For the rest, the rate is just £116.75 a week at present, rising to £118.75 – or £3 an hour – for full-time workers from April, but that only kicks in after three days of sickness.