With the focus on which party can create the most jobs, no one is looking at an issue of vital importance for millions – temp workers’ rights. Eamonn Dwyer investigates.

“When they called me into fire me, they made clear it wasn’t about my productivity, which was fine,” says Roger. “They said it was that that my attitude was too casual. I asked how much notice they were giving me. They said 20 minutes.”

At another company, Roger was hired on two-week contracts on a long-term basis. To prevent workers achieving one year’s service, which would qualify them for certain employment rights, the company failed to renew employees’ contracts every 11 months, and then rehired them two weeks later. One member of staff had been there for five years on these terms.

Roger says many employees would come into work even when they were sick because they were frightened of not getting their contract renewed. “People were afraid of joining a union in case they were targeted,” he adds.

There are 1.3 million temporary workers like Roger in Britain. Many have worked in the same roles for months, in some cases years. They can be fired without notice or redundancy pay. Legally, they are employees of the agency that hires them out, not the company they do the work for.

Do you want a job or not?

The business argument for temp workers is that it improves the flexibility of the labour market. It encourages employers to take on workers without worrying about cumbersome regulations or redundancy payments.

The Samosa spoke to Adrian Marlowe, chairman of the Association of Recruitment Consultants. The ARC recently dropped plans to launch a judicial review of the government’s recent Agency Workers Regulations bill, which was designed to implement the EU working directive on temps.

While the press described the bill as giving agency workers ‘the same rights as directly employed staff after 12 weeks’, the government was more circumspect, saying the bill aimed to ‘give fair treatment to agency workers and maintain labour market flexibility’.

Marlowe strongly believes a more open job market is best for the economy: “Based on our statistics, 55 per cent of agency workers are happy with the current arrangements and positively choose to act as agency workers.”

He is keen to make a distinction between low-paid agency workers in the hospitality sector, who he admits may need protection, and higher paid agency workers, who often earn more than employees in comparable positions.

Foreign companies looking to invest will be attracted by the flexibility and reduced costs of hiring; Britain has almost twice the number of temps as Germany, a much larger country.

It is a matter of debate how many of those extra temp jobs have been created by labour flexibility, and how many would have had full employee status were it not for Britain’s light-touch regulation.

“A lot of new workers are keen to move from one job to another,” says Marlowe. “There are professional agency workers who are quite happy with their lot. To increase the prospect of vexatious claims when everyone needs to be pulling together seems counter-productive.”

A halfway house

The recently passed Agency Workers Regulations mean that after 12 weeks, temporary workers now need to be paid the same as equivalent employees of the company, get the same number of holidays and receive benefits like childcare or access to the canteen. There are provisions to ensure companies cannot simply fire and re-hire, like Roger’s former employers.

But there is still no requirement of notice or redundancy payments if you’re fired, no company sick pay, no maternity or paternity leave, no benefits in kind, and no company bonuses.

The legislation doesn’t come into effect until October 2011 – the latest the government could pass the legislation without breaking EU rules. Law firm Charles Russell have told clients the bill “is good news for employers, as the approach taken by the government to date has generally been well received by businesses.”

The Samosa asked the TUC’s Fair to Agency Workers campaign for comment, but they were unable to provide any before our deadline. Instead we asked leading industrial affairs reporter (and former Samosa editor) Rene Lavanchy about the trade unions’ attitude.

“The CWU [Communication Workers' Union] has already suggested to me they might have to challenge the rules in the European Court of Justice,” says Lavanchy, “because they’re more limited than the original directive they’re meant to transpose.”

He also suggests some unions may be pinning their hopes on changing Labour policy after the election: “The government has accepted that the banking boom wasn’t all good, but they haven’t turned their back on the Thatcher and Major union laws of the 80s and 90s.

“To change party policy, the view of some unions is the policy-making machinery needs to change. What happens after the election will be interesting”.

The parties' positions

In electoral terms, the Agency Workers Regulations represent the peak of New Labour’s ambitions for temp workers’ rights; its manifesto boasts of enacting the regulations but makes no promises for further reform. After years of delay, often collaborating with employers, this is unsurprising.

The Conservatives have promised to repeal the Agency Workers Regulations. This may prove a point of principle rather than practice. An industry law firm has commented: ‘The reality is that any Conservative government would have limited power to amend the Regulations, let alone repeal them, given that they derive from EU legislation.’

The Greens pledge to ‘ensure that workers’ rights apply to part-time, casual workers and the self-employed, and from the first day of employment’. The aspiration is long on solidarity but short on specifics – it is unclear whether it wants an expansion of Agency Worker Regulations or an end to temporary working entirely.

There is no mention of temp workers’ rights in the Liberal Democrats manifesto, but under the section ‘Enabling Enterprise’ they promise to ‘put an end to the so-called “gold plating” of EU rules, so that British businesses are not disadvantaged relative to European competitors.’

If the Lib Dems listen to the ARC, then the Agency Workers Regulations is full of ‘gold-plating’ in which ‘small and medium sized businesses are the big losers’.

At a time of large unemployment and limited investment into the British economy, it is clear none of the mainstream parties want to spearhead workers’ rights. Job numbers, not job rights, are the talking points.

Roger no longer works as a temp and is now employed on a permanent contract

eamonn.dwyer83@gmail.com
http://www.twitter.com/eamonndwyer