The impact of the financial crisis and ensuing austerity had a significant impact on the Industrial relations landscape in Ireland. A casualty of the crisis was the competitive corporatist social partnership model and a move towards a more Liberal market economy with a concomitant fall in union density and thus bargaining power. Austerity measures included the reduction of employers social insurance contributions for low paid jobs and a shift away from a relatively generous and benign welfare system towards one, which has conditionality and sanctions embedded akin to work first approaches to welfare in countries such as the US (Murphy 2016, O’Sullivan et al 2015). Alongside these development there has been a rise zero hours work or fragmented and variable working time arrangements which are often disconnected from protective legislation (Campbell 2017) and which place most of the risks associated with employment on to the worker. International evidence points clearly to a positive relationship between the rise of such work arrangements and precarity (Kalleberg 2012, Vosko 2010). Regulation of zero hours work has been the subject of much debate in the Irish context. In this chapter we use data from an Irish study conducted in 2015 by the authors to examine the efficacy of the legislation. We argue that contrary to employer and government assertions, existing legislation has been largely ineffective in protecting vulnerable workers. Furthermore when the intersection between austerity measures and the legislation is examined, we find that the legislation has exacerbated the precariousness of many workers in the Irish context and has served to increase erosion of the SER