Zero hour contracts,ghost jobs and agency workers in England

Raj stays on Bruce road ,Bow road i east London and works at Medway mail centre in Rochester, south east England.as an agency worker of Angard staffing .Although he is on a zero hour contract ,he was had the opportunity to work 40 hours per week on a night shift over christmas 2014.

He spent half of his pay to travel to and from work but thinks that it is better to work than to live perpetually on benefits such as job-seekers allowance. He does the same work as Medways’s own staff, and often substitutes for their absences – but is on the minimum wage; they get more pay. They’re on a rota, while he has to wait by his phone for each shift.He has no sick pay entitlement.

Normally,Raj never knows when he will be working:in october 2014, he was contactedin the morning to be told he had 45 minutes to his next shift. Nor does he know where he will be working.Medway is over 50 miles by train, and the travel costs mean anything less than a eight -hour shift is the means his travelling expenses would exceed his pay for the shift . When he turns down suchan offer, the agency then uses a legal loophole to class him him as unavailable for work and denies him pay.
In his article" Ghost jobs, half lives: how agency workers ‘get by’ in Britain’s shadow economy,"
(www.the Guardian.com,Jan 21 2015) Aditya Chakrabortty,states that with "an estimated 1.2 million agency workers and another 600,000 on zero-hours contracts, and you have a shadow workforce of about 1.8 million unpeople, enjoying none of the security that should come with employment in a rich country."

In addition,he stresses that "they are never going to be helped by prime ministerial exhortations for a pay rise. As such, they form part of the answer to one of the major conundrums in Britain: what’s gone wrong in our labour market. This Wednesday will see the monthly ritual of a jobs report showing record employment, but meagre wage rises." The Christmas period was good for Raj but that is over now and a recent text message from his agency stated that there is virtually no work available and that he should consider going onannual leave.

This is the reality of the agency worker of today-sheer uncertainty.

Medway is a region and a unitary authority.It is located in the southeast of England and comprises of a collection of towns including Strood, Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham, and Rainham.The unitary Authority was formed in 1998 when the City of Rochester-upon-Medway amalgamated with Gillingham borough Council and part of Kent County Council to form a unitary Council, a unitary authority independent of Kent County Council. In 2011,its population was estimated at 264,000,92 per cent of which were white.Blacks,Asians and mixed races comprised 8 per cent.