Zero Hours Contract UK Can Double Your Income

The zero hours contract uk topic is discussed heavily across the media at the moment, so we thought we’d break it down and give you the insight into the zero hour contracts industry.

What is a zero hour contract?

According to Wikipedia, it’s ‘where the employer purports to have the discretion to vary the employee’s working hours, usually anywhere from full-time to “zero hours”’.

What is missing from Wikipedia is that zero hour contracts allow individuals to have multiple employers and work the times that suits employees (can be from 9-5 or 4-12, it’s the employees choice). People working zero hour contracts are usually freelancers who are good at what they do and are confident they can get a task or project done in a certain time period. There has been a lot of controversy around zero hour contracts due to the fact that large corporations are using this as huge loop to save on staffing costs, even when revenues are well in their millions.

Let’s do a bit of research into the type of work that you can expect to be doing on zero hour contracts. The food and accommodation industry is the highest in terms of zero hours, which is quite understandable, considering that hospitality companies need staff sometimes to work 12-hour events and sometimes 4-hour events, which makes sense to hire someone for that time period. The lack of employee rights, is as shame, but it can be used to the employees advantage.

What a lot of people miss about zero hour contracts is that the employer is just as much at risk as the employee, because employees can have multiple employers and work the hours they choose. This sort of work is mostly popular around students who are in full-time education, and would like to earn extra cash to cover living costs. Some students work for 3-4 different employers in order to get the ideal hours they want doing what they choose.

This also begs the question, why is self-employment at a 40 year high? Maybe people are actually choosing to work zero-hour contracts, since there are more opportunities and flexibility. Yes everyone is going on about employee rights, but lets assess exactly what a full-time person gets that a zero hour contracted person wouldn’t.

Zero hour contracts have no work security

This means you are only paid for the hours you work. Full-time staff have to work contracted hours (usually 9-5). But what we cannot apply here is that zero hour contracted people work for one company, so while yes one day a company might not have work, 2 other employers might need help. Some people can earn £600 per week by filling the hours they can work over the course of the week and pick the hourly rate that they are happy with. A full-time person gets a fixed hourly rate, no matter if the work is more pressure or not.

Zero hour contracts have no paid sick leave

Which is a shame, but the pressure of missing work is also not there. If you work for the first 2 weeks of the month every single day of the week (weekends are also very popular work days for zero hour contracts) you can relax and even take a week off towards the end of the month, with no pressure to get back to work.

So what else do zero hour contracts have to offer?

• You meet new people every single hour contract you take on
• You learn new skills, and can take on contracts that you enjoy working
• You can work for multiple employers, the hours you want
• You can work part-time for work security, and enjoy zero hour contracts (be sure to check the employment contract before you try this)
• You can take time off when you want (planning holidays is never a problem)
• You can double a full-time income by working the days and hours you want.
• You can partner zero hour contracts with other things happening in your life (education, kids, travelling)
• Zero hour contracts help you save for things you want faster

But none of the above points are new. This way of working has been around for 40 years, so why are zero hour contracts causing so much controversy?

Large corporations recently started filling full-time positions with zero hour contractors, which is not great as this way of working is not for everyone. Some of the companies include SportsDirects, Tesco and Homebase.

Zero hour contracts moved online

A lot of the discussion around this topic has been based on the UK workforce doing physical labour. However, in the last 5 years, online businesses have been inspired to open up the zero hour contracts online. With websites like Freelancers.xxx allowing people to monetise skills online, zero hour contracts are now going digital. If you are a copywriter, you can list your service on the website and people will pay for fixed deliverables, like with traditional zero hour contracts. The zero hour industry is expected grow a lot more according to the Mirror, which is not surprising that some of these are finding work online. Zero hour contracts will grow into micro jobs to ensure that people get a fair price for the hours and work they put in for the work.

Example of a micro job service online:

A full-time graphic designer’s pay per hour could be £11 (works out approx. £22,000 a year). With microjobs, a graphic designer can list a job that they can do in an hour (I will spend 1 hour reviewing your website design for £10, I will spend 1 hour designing your logo for £10). This way of working is becoming increasingly attractive to businesses who might just need people for a few hours, rather than pay the whole year’s worth of salary. With the attractive payment structure for skills, members on Freelancers.xxx receive up to 15 orders a day for their skills, that means earning a lot without leaving your house.

Let us know what you think about zero hour contracts, would you work on zero hours only, would you mix it with a full-time or part time job, or is it not really your cup of tea and you would like to stick to your full-time position?