Welfare-to-work, zero-hours contracts and human rights

Abstract

In response to concerns that non-standard work arrangements are precarious, it is often suggested that they are valuable for workers and employers because it is important for all to have the option of flexibility at work. In this article, I look at the relationship between welfare conditionality and zero-hours contracts, which constitute particularly precarious working arrangements. When we examine these together with schemes of strict conditionality particularly, we observe that many people do not choose non-standard work because of the flexibility that it offers, but are required to accept the jobs in question for otherwise the authorities will withdraw welfare support, and welfare claimants may be faced with destitution. Welfare conditionality schemes that are particularly punitive can turn, in this way, the unemployed poor into working and exploited poor. This piece further argues that schemes with strict conditionality that force and trap people into these arrangements raise issues under human rights law. In these situations we are faced with what I have described elsewhere as ‘state-mediated structures of exploitation’. The state is responsible for creating vulnerability to exploitation from which private employers benefit, and has duties under human rights law to change the laws in question in order to destabilise the unjust structures. To develop my argument, I first look at the meaning of the concept ‘zero-hours contracts’. I then turn to welfare conditionality schemes in the second section to explain how schemes with strict conditionality, and particularly the UK Universal Credit, force people into precarious work by threatening them with serious sanctions. The combination of rules on strict conditionality and zero-hours work leads to the construction of structures of exploitation, as the third section explains by reference to empirical research that has explored the effects of the schemes on people’s lives. In the fourth part, I argue that welfare conditionality schemes that force and trap people into zero-hours and other precarious work may violate several