No doubt you will be familiar with the idea that when you apply for a job, the employer will state how many hours a week this will be but do you know what a zero hours’ contract is?

Full time employment tends to be 39 hours a week. Part time work can be whatever the employer needs and you will often see the salary written down as an amount pro-rata. This displays what the salary would be if you were working full time. You’ll then have to work out what you will actually earn if you are being employed say 20 hours a week. As an example:

A job is advertised at £30,000 pro-rata and the hours of work are 20 hours a week. You need to divide the number of hours that you will be working a week by the full time hours and then multiply the pro rata salary advertised by this as shown below. This will show you what you would actually earn per year.

£30,000 x (20 ÷ 39 0.512) = £15,360

Zero hours’ contracts

If you are employed on a zero hours’ contract, then you are employed on a casual basis.

A zero hours’ contract means that:

• Your employer will expect you to be on call for when and if they need you
• Your employer does not legally have to give you any work
• You do not have to do any work for the employer if you don’t want to

Zero hours’ contracts can be useful for employers who don’t quite know when something will need to be done or if they need a pool of people to be available at short notice but don’t quite know how many people that they will need.

As a worker, you might find a zero hour’s contract useful if you are in a position where you might fancy picking up some work but you don’t want to be committed to working all day, every day.

Previously there had been some problems with employers putting people on zero hours’ contracts and yet also telling them that they could not do any work for anybody else or say no to work when it was offered. Your employer cannot do this now. As an employee on a zero hours’ you are legally allowed to take other work and to say no to work offered.