Zero hour contract

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A zero-hour contract ( English zero-hours contract ) is a contract in which the parties agree that one party shall provide services for the other party and receives a remuneration. The specialty is that the contract stipulates a minimum employment time of zero hours. The person obliged to serve should only take action if the person entitled to service has a corresponding need for the service.

If the service provider is entitled to refuse the service in spite of the request, i.e. if he is free of instructions, the contract is a service contract in the narrower sense. If there is no such right of refusal, the contract must be classified as an employment contract . In this case one speaks of a zero-hour employment contract . According to German law, zero-hour employment contracts qualify as work on demand . As a special form of part-time work, work on call is subject to the regulations of the Part-Time and Temporary Employment Act (TzBfG), in particular Section 12 TzBfG. According to German law, a zero-hour employment contract must therefore stipulate a certain duration of the weekly and daily working hours. In the absence of such a specification - as is usual with zero-hour contracts - a weekly working time of twenty hours is deemed to have been agreed. The contract itself remains in effect.

Zero-hour contracts are economically advantageous for those entitled to work because they only have to pay remuneration if the person obliged to work is actually active. If there is no work, no remuneration is paid. From an economic point of view, zero-hour contracts therefore have a similar function to contracts for work and services or as temporary workers .

Zero-hours contracts are particularly widespread in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands . In the Netherlands, almost a million workers have such an employment contract. Statisticians estimate there are around 1.4 million such contracts in the UK. The regulation of zero-hour contracts was a key campaign issue ahead of the 2015 general election . In the Netherlands, too, almost a million people work as on-call workers without fixed hours.

literature

  • Marcus Bieder : The zero-hour contract - a permissible flexibilization instrument or a pioneer for modern day labor? In: Law of Labor 2015, pp. 388–399.
  • Gerrit Forst: zero-hour contracts. In: Neue Zeitschrift für Arbeitsrecht 2014, pp. 998–1002.
  • Patrick Gunnigle et al. a .: Study on the Prevalence of Zero Hours Contracts among Irish Employers and their Impact on Employees 2015 , University of Limerick, November 2015 ( pdf ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Federal Labor Court, judgment of September 25, 2014 - 5 AZR 1024/12 - ( pdf ).
  2. ↑ https://www.volkskrant.nl/economie/wat-heb-ik-aan-een-nulurencontract~bd7d8bac/?referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.be%2F
  3. ↑ Marcus Theurer: “ Working on demand: Great Britain's modern day laborers .” In: FAZ.net , May 7, 2014, accessed December 1, 2015.
  4. ^ RD: " Why" zero hours "contracts are not as bad as Britain's Labor Party thinks ". In: The Economist explains , The Economist , April 9, 2015, accessed December 1, 2015.
  5. ↑ https://www.volkskrant.nl/economie/wat-heb-ik-aan-een-nulurencontract~bd7d8bac/ De Volkskrant, accessed on 05 November 2019