Miliband criticises Sports Direct over practicing Victorian zero hour contracts

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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Labour leader Ed Miliband has criticised high-street chain Sports Direct on Saturday over using “Victorian” practices for recruiting thousands of employees on zero-hours contracts.

Mr Miliband has attacked the firm at a Labour party conference in Coventry for being “a terrible place to work” for workers, and said: “Zero-hours contracts are the way Sports direct employs the vast majority of its workforce, 17,000 out of its 20,000 workers.”

He has added: “These Victorian practices, the epidemic of zero-hours contracts that we see at Sports Direct, have no place in the 21st Century.”

Through zero-hours contracts, the employers get able to hire staff without any guarantee of work on temporary basis and on flexible and unpredictable hours. They don’t include maternity or sick pay, nor give employees the right to challenge an unfair dismissal.

Mr Miliband has shown intention to ban the use of such contracts in the future for regular working employees and said: “If you work regular hours, you will have the legal right to regular contracts.”

During the claims of the Labour leader over the unfair practice, Business Minister Matthew Hancock has told that the government is already adopting measures to confront the abuse of zero-hours contracts.

Mr Hancock has said Miliband’s plans to ban employers from using such terms represented a “rehashed policy” and said Miliband’s own Doncaster Council had admitted using 300 people on zero-hours terms.

According to the Office for National Statistics estimated figure earlier this year, around 1.4 million people were on zero-hours contracts in the U.K.

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