According to the Department of Trade and Industry more than 1 million UK workers are on a fixed-term contract (FTC), dangling on a string with no guarantee of future employment.
Sometimes it seems as if most of them are in the entertainment industry - from researchers in TV production offices to front-of-house staff in theatres, fixed term contracts have become an industry disease.
Workers on FTCs have to live with uncertainty about their futures, have trouble with basic needs like credit and mortgages, and in many areas, suffer the humiliation of having to sign away their rights to get a job in the first place.
Even on the employers' side there are growing doubts about the wisdom of keeping people dangling in contractual limbo. There's an apocryphal rule-of-thumb that contract staff spend their first three weeks finding the loos, and their last three months finding a new job - not exactly an aid to productivity from the bosses' point of view.
Legally, the lapping tide of new rights for contract workers has gradually eroded their attraction as an easy source of hire-and-fire labour which can be shovelled around the economic graphs to smooth out undulations in the business cycle. They are more difficult and expensive to get rid of than they were ten years ago.
Now we look set for the final death blow to the notion that FTCs are good for business. On July 10 this year, new regulations on fixed-term contracts are being introduced to bring the UK into line with European law (Europe to the rescue again?)
In future, contract workers cannot be treated any worse than their permanent counterparts when pay, pensions, and other benefits are determined. They will qualify for employment rights, sick pay, training and a host of other benefits, in the same way, and at the same time, as permanent staff doing the same job.
This includes redundancy pay, where an entitlement will kick in after two years on contract, and the right to apply for permanent jobs in the company from day one, if that's the rule for permanent staff.
Perhaps the most significant new provision in July's package will be a limit of four years on the period that an individual can be kept on fixed contract by an employer. This means that an end is in sight to the practice of renewing contracts again and again, sometimes for decades, without giving individuals employment rights - an injustice that BECTU has challenged many times in the courts.
Nothing is perfect of course, and the union is still battling to win improvements in the regulations which are still in draft form.
The four-year rule giving people permanent jobs, we say should be a two-year rule, and there needs to be special provision for workplaces, many of them in our industries, where so many people are on fixed contracts that it's difficult to find equivalent permanent workers whose rights can be used as a benchmark.
As usual, BECTU is having to carry the flag for so-called "atypical" workers - contract and freelance - who still seem to be a source of mystery to government, and for that matter, many other trade unions outside the entertainment sector.
Whether or not we manage to put our own final flourishes into the regulations, new rules must come into force on July 10, or the UK government will be in trouble with Europe - a place where BECTU has a proven record of forcing British Ministers to stick to the rules in the interests of its members.
The benefit of the new regime will be felt not only in our industries, but to a disproportionate degree, in the public sector. DTI research has revealed that nearly three out of four contract workers with two years' employment - dangling on that string in other words - are in the public sector.
Only a tiny minority are in the private sector, giving us the most powerful argument of all against the claim that fixed-term contracts are good for business - even business itself has decided that they're bad.
Tony Lennon
May 2002
