Zero Hours

I’m employed on a ‘zero hours’ contract, paid at £6.20 per hour. The care company I work for is not obligated to provide me with any hours, and in any case can only give me the hours which are available.

The most hours I have worked in a single week is 72, the least being 8. These are ‘contact’ hours spent face to face with clients and do not include travel time or account for a call running long. Generally you can add another 10-20 unpaid hours on top of what you have officially worked.

Sometimes the hours can be consistent, and other times erratic. Even if you get a decent number of hours today, the anxiety of not knowing if you’ll be given any hours tomorrow doesn’t go away. The lack of job security means you can never truly relax. It’s like having a regular job but being permanently on the verge of redundancy. If the coordinator who allocates your calls takes a dislike to you (care companies are hardly the most professional workplaces at the best of times) you’ll find your hours nose dive. I’ve seen a few carers ‘punished’ in this way.

It’s like the perfect storm of stress. If I work 60 (80) hours a week I can pay my rent and bills, but I don’t really have time to wash or sleep properly. I can afford decent food but don’t have time to eat it. If I work 10 hours a week I have time to eat, wash and sleep, but no money to buy food or pay bills. It’s like constantly living on a precipice. If there’s a problem receiving wages, like last years RBS/NatWest computer failure it sends your world into a tailspin.

If as careworkers we can not adequately care for ourselves, how can we be expected to adequately care for the vulnerable people we see?

I firmly believe zero hour contracts bring out the worst in the workforce. They pit carers against eachother, fighting over scraps, over whatever hours are available. It’s degrading. It’s especially noticeable during ‘down’ periods where service users may die or spend an extended period in respite or for one reason or another stop receiving care. Hours which may have been quite consistent for a few weeks suddenly drop.

Zero hours make you resentful. A few weeks ago I spent 2 hours at a clients home because of an emergency. The call itself is only supposed to last 30 mins for showering and dressing. On this particular morning the client was extremely distressed when I arrived and I spent most of the time reassuring the client and waiting for the out-of-hours doctor to phone back. It turns out the client had been prescribed incorrect medication and was experiencing withdrawal symptoms from his usual meds. The client was much more at ease after I left, knowing the cause of his distress. I felt pretty good about myself afterwards, I’d been presented with a difficult situation and handled it well. Unfortunately all I could think of was that for my 2 hours work I would only be paid for 30 minutes: £3.10. I’d also had to ‘hand back’ another two calls I was unable to get to, which were then given to another carer.

In homecare this is not an unusual situation, and it leads to the temptation to ignore potential emergency situations in order to get to your next call and make sure you get paid.

This post was originally published on the Mobile Carer Blog | @MobileCarerBlog