Employment
Geography: Edexcel A Level, topic 5.1.2
Types of Employment
In the UK, all employees have to have contracts of some type (except for illegal workers).
Permanent or fixed contracts
- The traditional type of employment is employees who have contracts. These might be long-term contracts for two years or shorter-term contracts for three months.
Temporary workers
- Temporary workers can be agency staff (workers provided at short notice by a recruitment agency). These agencies have a database with lots of workers who want to work at short notice.
- Temporary workers can also be volunteers e.g local charities may ask for support to help host an event (e.g. a bake sale) on a one-off Saturday.
Self-employed
- Self-employed workers may work as freelancers, consultants or contractors.
- These people may run their own business or sell their services to other businesses e.g software development contractors.
- They may incorporate as their own company so that they pay a smaller amount of tax.
Zero-hours contracts
- Zero-hours contracts are designed for casual 'piecework' or on-call work. The worker does not get any guaranteed work and may get 0 or 40 hours work in a week.
- Neither the employer or the employee have any obligations.
- Sports Direct was condemned for employing a lot of its staff on zero-hours contracts. Some people in government thought that their workers wanted and worked as full-time employees.
Temporary and seasonal work
- Temporary and seasonal work is usually low paid. This work is usually concentrated in the agricultural and tourism sectors.
- Harvest time in the summer will create seasonal work for workers in agriculture. Lots of this seasonal work is done by migrants from the EU.
- Similarly, London gets a lot of tourism in the summer. Local businesses (shops and restaurants) may take on extra workers to deal with demand.
Illegal work
- Illegal work is often done in poor working conditions on low or no pay.
- Migrant workers (legal or illegal) may be more vulnerable to this because of unfamiliarity with local conditions.
- Qatar is using a lot of migrant workers to build stadiums for the 2022 World Cup. They have been accused of human rights violations and the Washington Post reported that there have been 1,200 migrant worker deaths since 2010, while building Qatari infrastructure.