INSTITUTIONALISING AGENCY WORK

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: january 2013 :: RMTnews 16 Whilst purporting to protect agency workers, the overwhelming effect of the Agency Work Regulations (AWR) coming into force in the UK in October 2010 has been to normalise and institutionalise casualised labour. All EU countries were obliged to put in place regulations to bring national legislation on agency work in line with the ‘parity’ principle which underpins the 2008 EU Agency Work Directive. The Directive, which had been delayed for some years by a number of EU member states including the UK, aims to provide some minimum protection to Europe’s growing temporary agency workforce. Since 2010, users of agency workers have to ensure that agency workers benefit from the same basic pay and conditions as permanent workers occupying a comparable post. Although the provisions of the EU Directive cover basic employment rights (pay, duration of working time, night working, annual leave), and exclude redundancy pay, contractual sick pay, maternity/paternity pay, the CBI has been heavily critical of granting any form of equal treatment to agency workers, and signed up to the Directive only once they had an agreement that rights to equal pay and conditions would only kick after 12 weeks on the same temporary assignment. This means that most agency workers will not benefit from the new regulations. The CBI has since described the 2010 UK regulations as “gold-plated” and detrimental to job creation and UK businesses, claiming that the AWR is likely to have “cost firms £1.5m in compliance costs in the first year” . However the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) that represents employ- ment agencies, has found that the AWR has had little effect on the take-up of temporary workers. This confidence in of its role in providing flexible labour to companies may be due its ability to provide businesses with solutions that allow them to circumvent their new obligations to agency workers. Those in the labour movement who hoped that the AWR would provide agency workers with an important safety net that would give them at least some semblance of equal pay for equal work, have been alarmed to find that the so-called ‘Swedish Derogation’ is being used aggressively to keep down the pay of agency workers. The Swedish Derogation is a mechanism lodged within the EU Directive that allows member states to negotiate an exemption to the parity principle based on the employment status of the agency workers. Under the Swedish Derogation model, if the agency sets up a permanent employment contract with the agency worker, who is then hired out to a user-firm, there is no obligation to ensure that the agency worker receives basic pay and conditions comparable to a permanent worker on a similar job. According to a survey carried out for the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) 28 per cent of agencies have adopted this model. The full implications of the Swedish Derogation are still unclear, but the advantages it offers to businesses seeking to pay temporary workers less are INSTITUTIONALISING AGENCY WORK Researcher Christina Purcell explains how European Union Agency Work Regulations (AWR) are normalising the use of casual labour and allowing employers to cut pay