Ian Jack's article on government promotion of fake self-employment (Private companies are making a fortune out of the unemployed, 10 May) made me think that this government could be staging a huge hoax on voters.

Days earlier, the Guardian reported that, everywhere except London, the government's vaunted increase in "people in work" was solely due to the increase in "self-employment" (Explosion in self-employment across UK hides real story behind upbeat job figures, 6 May). Ian Jack points to various publicly funded programmes which get unemployed people to reclassify themselves as self-employed, not least the current enterprise allowance scheme. The latter can easily mask that unemployed people are simply accepting a modest reduction in their benefit income in return for freedom to earn a pittance from odd jobs and escape from Department for Work and Pensions harassment via major benefit "sanctions".

Before the next election, someone should investigate a sample of the new army of "self-employed" to check the proportion for whom "self-employed" is a grossly misleading description. And to check how many of the latter result from publicly funded schemes to make them claim what is a misleading label.

Charles Patmore

York

• The Resolution Foundation's research is important. While Thatcher kept the unemployment numbers down by moving many on to incapacity benefit, this government seems to be doing the same by forcing people to "choose" self-employment. However, these often inadequate incomes have to be supplemented with working tax credit just to make the income up to even the level of jobseeker's allowance.

Jeremy Engineer

Manager, Cheetham Hill Advice Centre

• Praise be to George Orwell for alerting us to "newspeak" in advance. A contract offered by an employer without a guarantee of paid work isn't in fact a job (Jobseekers told they must take zero-hours jobs, 6 May). It's a skewed contract for a new form of casual work.

It's now possible for the economy to expand, for increasing numbers of people to be "employed", for unemployment apparently to decrease, and the sum spent on social security to diminish, while more people earn less money in increasingly casualised workplaces. Parents are required to bring up children responsibly, while living in a form of servitude to licensed employers and petty line managers, often themselves at risk of returning to zero-hours. Please don't use the word "jobs" again in such circumstances, without the inverted commas.

Janet Dubé

Peebles, Scottish Borders

• I found Zoe Williams' piece (Zero-hours jobseekers? We've given up on workplace rights, 7 May) highly depressing but very informative. I just wish she had named and shamed more offending businesses. The only way we are going to change this culture is to vote with our feet and decide where we buy our caffè latte and which supermarket we shop in. Maybe when retailers realise that we don't want to be served by staff who are being treated so unfairly they will decide to change their position on zero hours.

Ian Phillips

London

• When listing the ways the government tries to wriggle out of its obligation to provide a safety net to the unemployed, Zoe Williams might have added a bizarre definition of "immigrant" of which my stepson was recently a victim. In spite of being a British citizen who had spent 25 of his 27 years of life in the UK, on returning from a two-year working holiday in Australia he was told he'd have to wait three months before he would be entitled to any benefits. If he hadn't a family to support him, what was he supposed to do?

Graham Hall

Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan

• Your welcome coverage (1 May) of the dark side of zero-hours contracts (ZHCs) did not mention the possible loss of state pension, one of the worst features of many such contracts. Anyone on a ZHC or short-hours contract who works for less than 18 hours a week at minimum wage, or earns less than £5,700 pa, will not get into the national insurance scheme and build a state pension. If that individual is working two or even three ZHCs or short-hours contracts, each of 15 hours, earning £5,000 in each, he must aggregate his income for tax; but he is not allowed to aggregate his income for NI cover, and thus build his state pension. If he returns to jobseeker's allowance, having given up the struggle, he then gets credited into NI and gets his pension rights. It is desperately unfair. Why can't the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the DWP get their act together?

Patricia Hollis

Labour, House of Lords