Workers on zero hours contracts should be protected by new rights and legislation, according to a report ordered by the Chief Minister.

Howard Quayle asked Health Minister David Ashford to chair a committee to look at the issue and deliver a report.

The report said that the committee found ’no evidence of widespread systematic abuse of zero hours contracts’.

However, in the final report, Mr Ashford and the committee said the Department for Enterprise should bring forward legislation which will help protect workers.

This will include extending the present right of employees to receive a written statement of particulars to all workers and reviewing the particulars which are presently specified in the Isle of Man Employment Act 2006 and require the employer of workers who are not in regular employment to refer workers to information issued by the DfE setting out their main employment rights.

The suggested new laws could also ’provide a right to workers who are not in regular employment to request a stable contract from the employer after six months if their hours, pattern of work and/or work activities indicate there is an ongoing relationship between the workers and the employer’.

The report also suggests regulating contracts which impose one-sided obligations through a range of measures to include ’requiring employers of workers who are not in regular employment to state any guaranteed hours in the written statement’.

And government could change the nature of the working relationship by removing employers’ powers to oblige workers who are not in regular employment to work any non-guaranteed hours.

A concern of the committee was for people who work zero hours who have shifts cancelled or changed at late notice. The report said: ’Cancelling work at short notice, or when the individual turns up at the place of work, is unacceptable unless truly unavoidable.’

The DfE has been advised to bring in legislation ’prohibiting employers from cancelling shifts of workers who are not in regular employment at short notice without providing for them to be paid as if the hours had been worked’.

It was also noted that there appears to be a lack of awareness in general about the rights of workers. The results of the employers’ survey showed that only two thirds of respondents were aware of the requirement to pay the minimum wage.

However, due to the use of the contracts in both the public and private sectors there is ’evidence of the value of zero hours contracts to the island’s diverse economy’ and as such the committee would not suggest an outright ban of zero hour contracts.