When you are doing a job of work for someone you should have the legal right to expect to be paid for it.

Bosses, particularly in the hospitality and also the retail sector are asking, as part of the recruitment process, for prospective employees to do a trial shift.

Fair enough, but they are asking them to do trial shifts for no money, to work for free.

Trial shifts are not interviews.

So, someone is doing a job waiting tables in a restaurant.

When we go to a restaurant there are costs involved other than the food.

There is the restaurant management, the kitchen staff, bar staff and the waiting staff.

All of these cost money and together with the restaurant overheads determines the price of the meal.

If one of the waiting staff is on a trial shift, the restaurant doesn’t reduce the cost of the meal for the diner.

So, the owners are making even more money out of the trail shifters as the profit margin on those shifts is higher than normal.

It is exploitation, pure and simple.

Since the Glasgow Times ran a story this week about a student asked to do a three-day trial shift in a clothing store and was left to manage the premises while the manager went out, we have been told of the other practices of some employers who make use of this tactic.

One was that on Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, some restaurants would take staff on for trial shifts because they were busier than normal.

The trialists never heard back or were told they didn’t get the job. Exploitation, pure and simple and deceitful into the bargain.

Yes, trial shifts are immoral, exploitative, often deceitful but what they are not, is illegal.

There are expectations on the employer about “reasonable time” and tasks to determine suitability for the job. But there is nothing in employment law that says the job candidate should be paid for their time sand labour.

The UK government stance on trial shifts is that UK employment law sets out the statutory minimum rights and responsibilities for individuals and employers in the workplace.

That law says as part of a recruitment process, an individual may be asked by a prospective employer to carry out tasks, without payment, to help the employer to decide whether the individual has the skills and qualities required for the job.

There are a number of tests to decide if someone should have been paid depending on whether the trial length exceeds the time that the employer would reasonably need to test the individual’s ability to carry out the job offered.

The extent to which the individual is observed while carrying out the tasks, the nature of the tasks and how closely these relate to the job offered and whether the tasks carried out have a value to the employer beyond testing the individual.”

Glasgow South MP Stewart McDonald tried to change that and presented a Bill to the house of Commons to ban unpaid trial shifts.

It would have set out in law what a trial shift was and would have required the minimum wage to be paid for the work.

The end result was it was “talked out” by the government benches at Westminster meaning it was blocked from moving to the next stage and had no chance of becoming law.

Employers do not need to use unpaid trial shifts to decide if someone is good enough to be offered a job.

As it is mostly, but not exclusively, in the hospitality trade, they can set up a mock service and get the applicant to serve a table.

This would be as part of the interview process. If they think they are good enough then they can offer a job on a probationary basis, as most jobs are.

But while the law allows for it to be used there will be employers who abuse it.

There are of course other times where people are working for free. Many people will do work experience placements. It is mostly as part of a college course and is part of the learning process.

In these cases, the worker should be supernumerary to the existing staff and used as cover for fully qualified staff who should be using their time to help train the work experience person.

In these cases, it should be the person doing the work placement who gets more out of the arrangement, not the employer.

Then of course there is the unpaid intern. An altogether different type of arrangement.

In this case someone who often has the luxury of being able to work for free for a number of weeks or months to get their foot in the door to a long term lucrative career.

The people losing out in this case is the people who are just as suitably qualified but do not have the luxury of family wealth behind them to subsidise an unpaid internship.

There is a serious argument to be made for unpaid internships to be banned too, in order to create a more level playing field for young people starting out in their careers.

All of this leads to the conclusion that employment law in the UK is not working in the interest of those who are supplying the labour.