In Britain's labour market 'flexibility' means letting employers off the hook

The idea that zero-hours contracts somehow benefit staff is undermined by the fact so many people on them wish they weren't

Zero-hours contracts are the ultimate expression of Britain's "flexible" labour market. Deregulate the workforce, free up firms to hire and fire, and they will be less burdened by fixed costs, leaner and more competitive - and create more jobs. So went the post-Thatcherite consensus.

So now we have at least 697,000 workers in the economy who don't know how many hours they're going to be working from one week to the next, or sometimes even one day to the next. In theory, they might be footloose and fancy-free - using their spare time to launch a dotcom startup or gig with a band. Yet these workers, many of whom are juggling more than one zero-hours contract, according to the ONS (which explains why there are 1.8m of them) fit exactly the characteristics of the groups that usually do worst out of the labour market.