This on-going impact study on the phenomenon of ‘zero hours employment’ arises from research carried out by Dr Brendan Burchell and his then ESRC funded PhD student Alex Wood on the effects of zero hour contracts on supermarket workers in the UK and US. Rather than advocating either the banning of zero hour contracts or their unregulated use, the project and subsequent dialogues have produced a number of very practical avenues that would permit the use of management driven flexible scheduling where it is genuinely the only efficient way of working, but restricting it or ameliorating the negative effects through, for instance, better management practices.
What is the problem that this research aims to address?
This research project sets out to (1) address the public interest in and confusion regarding ‘zero hours employment’, and (2) develop an improved understanding of the ways in which the phenomenon of ‘zero hours employment’ can be better understood. Such research is important, particularly because there has been considerable public concern regarding this phenomenon – publicly conceived as a form of 'harmful insecure scheduling'. A good illustration of this public worry is the recent changes to how people in the UK tend to think about quality of employment: whilst health and safety traditionally has been narrowly defined around very specific dangers at work, such as unguarded machinery or toxic chemicals, the remit of health and safety has now been broadened to include hazards like stress at work.
"Sometimes, partly by coincidence, research findings have much to add to a current public debate about a problem, not only to better understand a problem by casting it in a new conceptual framework, but also to suggest new solutions. This research on Zero Hours Contracts, and the follow-up work to maximise impact, achieved these two goals" – Dr Brendan Burchell.
What is the underpinning research?
The initial research conducted as part of this project has already had a considerable impact both on the public and on policy makers. For example, a newspaper article drawing on Burchell and Wood’s research on ‘zero hours employment’, published in the Observer in April 2014, received almost a thousand comments in the few days after publication. A further publication based on this research appeared in the British Safety Council's magazine Safety Management, describing the project’s main findings for managers and practitioners.
The researchers involved in this project have received several invitations to speak with policy makers about their findings. For example, they spoke to the government's Department of Business, Innovation and Skills at the time when this department was conducting a review of Zero Hour Contracts. The researchers also spoke to Liberal Democrat Special Advisors (through links with CIPD). Moreover, they have attended meetings in the House of Commons with the Labour Party in order to assist the Labour Party in their preparation of the manifesto for the 2015 general election.
Following the completion of the initial stage of the project, the researchers received further funding from the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account to fund the "Zero to Zero" project. This second part of the project is collaborative and organised by the University of Cambridge Department of Sociology with the CIPD, TUC and the Health and Safety Executive. As part of this second stage of the research project, a diverse range of experts and practitioners were brought together to discuss the ways in which the problems encapsulated by zero hour contracts could be overcome. Participants at two workshops, held during the last two months of 2015, included trade unionists, human resource managers, academics, consultants and health and safety managers. Many points of view were expressed during the course of the discussions that were informed by expert presentations by Dr Wood (now University of Oxford), Dr Burchell (University of Cambridge), Gerwyn Davis (CIPD), Hannah Reed (TUC) and Peter Kelly (Health and Safety Executive). Encouragingly, there were a number of areas of agreement and some original solutions were developed which may enable experiences of zero hour contracts and flexible scheduling to be improved. The final report based on these workshops can be found here.
Resources relevant to this case study
Wood, A. J., 2016. Flexible scheduling, degradation of job quality and barriers to collective voice. Human Relations, pp.1-22.
Burchell, B. and Wood, A., 2015. What Dave, Vince and Ed don’t tell you about zero-hour contracts. Open Democracy UK [blog] 14 April.
The project's homepage: http://www.zero.sociology.cam.ac.uk/
The University of Cambridge, 2014. Zero-hours contracts are ‘tip of the iceberg’ of damaging shift work, say researcher. University of Cambridge Research [online] 18 April.
Burchell, B. and Wood, A., 2015. Zero Hours Employment: A New Temporality of Capitalism? CritCom [online] 16 September.