Bosses’ zero-hours contracts obsession has sent workers’ rights back to an age where miners’ pay was decided by the price of coal, industrial experts have claimed.

A Wales TUC paper launched at the Welsh Assembly last night warns the assault on workers’ rights could result in the re-emergence of “sliding scale” pay.

Zero-hours contracts are making working people a “dispensable commodity” for bosses, authors Dr Karen Williams and Dr Jean Jenkins argue.

They wrote: “The zero-hours contract embodies the abandonment of any conception of the worker as a citizen with legitimate rights and aspirations or individual needs beyond bare subsistence.

“It seems that in the brave new world of 21st-century employment, the neoliberal rhetoric of market imperatives is leading us backwards to the days of the sliding scale, whereby miners’ wages were tied to the price of coal rather than a living wage.”

Sliding-scale pay sparked a landmark 20-week strike by Welsh miners in 1898. The strike was lost but led to the creation of the South Wales Miners’ Federation and to improved pay and conditions.

The warning from history is delivered in the new TUC paper that calls for Wales to take the lead on industrial relations.

Labour AM Lynne Neagle said: “Taking on issues as wide ranging as zero-hours contracts, skills policy and the future shape of our towns and cities, Debating Industrial Policy in Wales fills an important gap when it comes to critical yet constructive thinking on Wales’s economic future.”