“It’s the uncertainty that gets to me,” Shirley says, despondently. “These contracts only work one way – they don’t offer any flexibility even if you wanted it because if you turn down hours you suffer. One of the girls had her hours permanently reduced because she asked the line manager for a day off to take her child to the doctors. From that day on her card was marked”.
You might assume that Shirley works at the shadowy margins of Britain’s labour market but she doesn’t. She’s a Day Services Support Worker at a North-West care home run by one of the UK’s leading independent providers of health and social care services and for the past year she’s been on a zero-hours contract.
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