Dr. Michelle O'Sullivan:

It is welcome to have regulations which at least have some kind of security. At the moment, we pretty much have a zero-sum game with regard to the issue of if-and-when contracts. The notion that there is no other way of organising hours to suit business needs if we do not have if-and-when contracts is quite a narrow way of thinking about the management of working hours when there are other examples in other countries across Europe of how it can be done. We would caution against going down the route of the UK which had minimal regulation, making exclusivity clauses unenforceable. We would caution against that very light form of regulation. Legal experts in the UK say that the idea of stopping someone on a zero-hour contract from working for someone else was never a real problem to begin with, and therefore introducing that kind of regulation has not increased any level of protection for people, and the number of people on zero-hour contracts in the UK has increased. Its definition of zero-hour contracts includes our definition of if-and-when contracts.