I very much welcome the opportunity to take part in a debate on working conditions and wages. The reason the Labour Party exists and was formed in the beginning was to defend workers against exploitation.

Times in terms of employment have changed, and for most workers, not for the better, over the last 40 years. In the 1970s, the expectation was for full-time, either waged or salaried employment in a job, if not for life, then until you wished to move on. Most large employers were fully unionised, with overtime rates at time-and-a-half and double time for Sundays, and if you had to work regular shifts, there was a shift supplement, generally in the order of 30 per cent of basic salary. It will probably come as a surprise to an awful lot of people working today that such conditions existed, certainly within the lifetime of many of them.

The Conservative Government, as well as destroying whole industries, also set about casualising the labour market. It was described as having a flexible workforce, but what it meant was poorer terms and conditions for the workforce. This, alongside the vicious attack on collective bargaining and the trade unions, has led to the employment conditions of today. Today, the world of work is very different to that of the 1970s, with the growth of not only zero-hours contracts or low guaranteed-hours contracts, but a large number of agency workers and self-employed subcontractors.

There are areas of the economy where each of those suits both employers and employees: for zero-hours contracts, things such as irregular sports events, such as people working behind the bar in the Liberty Stadium once a fortnight. Now, that’s obviously going to be irregular because they only play there once a fortnight. It would be unreasonable for anybody to expect that to be a full-time job—people to turn up for 35 hours, or even every Saturday, when there are only matches once a fortnight. But they are used far more than in places like that. Zero-hours contracts do work for that. And agency workers do fill a skill gap. In fact, agency workers used to be highly paid people in areas like engineering and computing, who went in and were paid substantial sums of money. Unfortunately, that’s changed. And self-employed subcontractors for short-term needs, and low guaranteed hours to fit in with caring responsibilities. Unfortunately, those are not the only reasons that the above contract types are used.

Zero-hours contracts, which offer no guaranteed minimum hours of work, can require a worker to be available for work at all times and give the employer total control over the amount of work each worker gets each week. This is a twenty-first century version of the dockers having to queue up to be called for work, except you don’t have to queue anymore, you have to wait for a text message instead. But it is effectively the same process of waiting for a call to work by your employer. Low guaranteed hours, which is very common in areas such as retail, of one hour a day over a five or six days, are very similar to zero-hours contracts, but everyone has to clock in, at 8 o’clock or 9 o’clock, so that the employer can decide how long they will be needed to work. This, in many respects, does cause even more problems that zero-hours contracts, because people don’t know how much money they’re going to earn each week, and that’s really causing huge problems—that’s part of the call on food banks, part of the call on everything. People one week will work 40 hours, the next week they’ll work their minimum six. You can’t live like that. It’s easy for people sat in here, who get their salary paid in every month, to not understand just how bad it is for those people who are living lives like this. Some days they’ll go in and work one hour, from eight to nine in the morning, and another day they’ll work eight until nine, but that will be nine at night. The cost of variable workloads, instead of being shared between the employer and the employee, is shared solely by the employee. Agency workers and self-employed subcontractors have the equivalent of zero-hours contracts, but without even minimum employment support. The above explains why the majority of people in poverty in Wales are also in work.

Can I just say, from 1 April 2016, the Conservative Government at Westminster renamed the minimum wage ‘the living wage’, and introduced a mandatory national living for workers aged 25 and over? I think it was basically done to confuse. Renaming the minimum wage as ‘the living wage’ when we already had a living wage. I’m very proud to wear the living wage badge in here today—the real living wage badge—and I just cannot understand why anybody would support people being paid less than it costs for them to live. I believe everyone should be paid a living wage, as defined by the Living Wage Foundation. I don’t believe it makes sense that the Government enforces a minimum wage that it itself knows is not enough for people to live on—