The General Workers Union has long been pressing the new Labour administration to curb and abolish precarious work conditions such as term contracts.

It used to press the former government too but that administration either through inability or lack of real will, never curbed the spread of these precarious conditions.

With the new administration in place, the GWU has increased its urging and the government has been quite responsive.

In today’s issue, we reproduce what GWU Secretary General Tony Zarb said earlier this week and what GRTU had to say in response. In particular, GRTU has claimed that while GWU has been pressing the private sector, there are still pockets of precarious employment in the government sector.

There is so much in life that one would like to do but practical considerations and consequences sometimes rule out what otherwise would be desirable and just.

This is precisely the case here: on a general level, those countries where work conditions were tightly regulated have been the ones which suffered most in the financial crisis. Countries like Greece, France, Italy, etc have a very rigid labour market and thus their workforce is highly unionized, a job is for life, and hire and fire practices are next to impossible. These countries are finding it is imperative to have a more flexible labour market.

Such countries may well be thought of as a workers’ paradise but in actual reality the rigidity this entails in the economy undermines any flexibility that an economy needs to counter threats and problems and to respond to enterprising ventures.

It is true that, generally speaking, the US is less tightly regulated than Europe and this may also explain why Europe has had to struggle more to emerge from the crisis. But even in Europe things are changing.

While we in Malta have been having this rather old-fashioned debate about what have been called precarious work conditions, this has long been accepted in many other countries.

In the UK, the debate now is about zero-hours contracts. Until last week, it was often claimed that zero-hours jobs – the ultimate "flexible labour market" fix where employees are tied to a company with no guarantee of work – accounted for only a tiny fraction of the workforce.

‘Zero hours’, or ‘nil hours’, is a colloquial term for an employment contract under which the employee is not guaranteed work and is paid only for the work he or she carries out. The worker is usually expected to be around when the employer needs him or her to work, but the worker can also refuse the offer of work.

It has now been found that there are about a million of them in the UK alone – and their numbers are escalating. This is about household names: McDonald's, Boots, Amazon, Abercrombie & Fitch, Cineworld, the Tate galleries and even Buckingham Palace. All rely on zero-hours contracts.

Frances O’ Grady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, has condemned zero-hours contracts, calling on the Lib-Con coalition government to ‘stop stripping workers’ rights’.

Others, though, have come to the defence of zero-hours contracts. John Cridland, director general of the Confederation of British Industry, said those complaining about these contracts need a ‘reality check’: ‘If we hadn’t had this flexible working when the economy contracted, unemployment would have topped three million – and it didn’t. It went to 2.5million.’

Mark Bateson, chief economist of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said it was ‘too simplistic to dismiss such contracts as bad for the labour market or as the tool of greedy private-sector employers’.

Zero-hour contracts may serve useful pragmatic purposes for both employers and employees. They allow greater flexibility for both, in that employers save money by not having workers sitting around being idle, being paid but not doing any work, while workers can decide when and if they want to work. But they also often mean that workers struggle to earn enough for a decent standard of living.

For a minority, they can offer genuine flexible work and even the option of turning jobs down without paying a penalty (though other forms of casual or freelance work are likely to be more attractive). For the most part, however, this is a modern version of the dockers' line-up: on-call casual contracts where employees can be barred from working for another employer and still receive no pay. It's scarcely surprising zero-hours workers complain of being "bullied" and "terrified".

Even those commentators most hardened against the idea of zero-hours contracts do concede that there are some situations in which their use was appropriate. It’s hard to see how some industries could operate without at least some use of zero-hours contracts. At an outdoor tourist attraction, for example, a good weather forecast could see a fivefold increase in custom, but staffing in accordance with that maximum capacity would be prohibitively expensive.

Clearer thinking is necessary when we consider employers’ obligation towards their employees’ financial stability. An economy balanced towards the service industry will always require a high degree of flexibility. However, business leaders should not lose sight of the importance of employee engagement, and the impact that good morale can have on service quality. The argument against the over-use of zero-hours contracts is founded on business sense as much as upon ethics. The good news is that the technology exists to balance those obligations against the imperatives of fluctuating demand.

The discussion goes on. Union and business leaders in Malta would do well to consider what is being done elsewhere because it is quite instructive to know – and also what is done elsewhere sooner or later comes here. In fact, many employers in Malta probably employ zero-hours concepts without knowing the name.

To ban and prohibit, like any other prohibition, will see such practices go underground. Jobs will be lost and would-be entrepreneurs would be discouraged from investing and expanding. As stated above, the experience of other states shows that where regulation is hard and enforced, people in employment get to have a job for life, but eventually there would be less and less jobs on offer.

Instead of veiled threats and government impositions, what is really needed is a more open and constructive approach to the realities of today’s world and a coming together of efforts to reduce the negative impacts of new methods of work.