Forgive us but we do find this shouting about the evils of zero hours contracts to be really terribly amusing in one sense. For it is almost universally true that those writing the articles about the evils of zero hours contracts are themselves employed on zero hours contracts. Or, as it is also known, on a freelance basis and that just is the way that vast swathes of the media work:

What are zero-hours contracts? You asked Google – here’s the answer Dawn Foster

And off we go into a rather predictable Guardian rant about how awful such contracts are. Which then leads to our amusement, for when we examine the working life of the writer:

Dawn Foster is a writer on politics, social affairs and economics for The Guardian, London Review of Books, Independent and Times Literary Supplement, and is a regular political commentator for Sky News, Channel 4 News, and BBC Newsnight. Her first book, Lean Out, is on feminism, austerity and corporate culture.

Among us here at the ASI we have written for or appeared on near all of those outlets and the absolutely standard contract for all of them is a zero hours contract. It could be that this outpouring of protest is really a deeply buried attack on the media's own hiring practices, by those doing that very media reporting but we're really unsure as to whether people are being that Machiavellian. And observing the sharp elbowed jostle to gain absolutely any such work from any of those media outlets we really don't think people are protesting about their own employment.

Thus we're just left with the rather puzzling observation that zero hours contracts seem to be just fine for the middle class literati but obviously no one else should be allowed to enjoy the same employment structure. Which is, when you think about it, rather odd really.