The difference between three and zero hours a week is negligible, says Dunedin city councillor Aaron Hawkins.
Cr Hawkins worked at McDonald's when he was younger - from 1999 to 2001 - and he did not have a zero-hours contract.
He had guaranteed hours - three of them.
''We had a minimum rostered week of initially three hours, which then went down to two,'' he said.
''You got at least one shift a week, and the shortest shift was initially three hours [long], and then became two hours.''
''Zero-hour contracts'' have been the subject of a national debate as they come into more widespread use across the New Zealand workforce, particularly in the fast-food industry.
The contracts are commonly understood to be employment agreements that do not guarantee workers any hours, but - informally or contractually - involve employers expecting workers to be on call for work and to not get another job.
Some unions and workers employed under the contracts allege that employers who use zero-hour employment agreements will often revoke weekly shifts as a disciplinary action.
''A zero-hour contract is basically a permanent casual relationship, which is unheard of and legally is not supposed to exist,'' University of Otago law professor Paul Roth said last week.
But Cr Hawkins said that, in practice, zero-hour contracts were nothing new. His working conditions at McDonald's about 15 years ago had been nearly identical to those of employees with zero-hour contracts today.
McDonald's NZ communications manager Kim Bartlett said, although it uses employment agreements with no guaranteed hours, almost half of McDonald's employees worked more than 20 hours a week.
It was not company policy to reduce hours as a disciplinary measure, she said.
''If we received a complaint from an employee about this we would investigate it,'' she said.
Ms Bartlett was unable to confirm the company policy in the 1990s, since it was ''a long time ago''.
New Zealand Council of Trade Unions legal adviser Jeff Sissons said the case of Cr Hawkins showed problems in employer-employee relationships existed long before the widespread use of zero-hour contracts.
''Zero-hour contracts are one symptom of the underlying problem of the power imbalance between workers who don't have guaranteed hours and their bosses,'' he said.
