Headlines such as ‘Agency and temporary workers win rights
deal’ have publicised the agreement brokered by the government between the TUC
and the CBI. Though agency workers and temps have made some gains, the battle
for equal treatment is far from over. There are 1.4 million agency workers in
Britain. They have been getting a raw deal. They have no job security, no
holiday entitlement, no right to sick pay, no right to maternity provision and
no right to overtime rates.
Typically they may be working alongside directly employed
workers doing exactly the same work and only getting 80p for every pound the
workers on the company’s books get.
This is unfair and divisive. Agency workers are often
immigrants. If they are seen as undercutting more longstanding workers, that
can feed the flames of racism.
For six years the trade union movement has fought for equal
rights for temps and agency workers. At Warwick in 2004 the TUC and Labour
leaders agreed to implement equal rights for them. In 2005 equal rights for
agency workers was put into the election manifesto upon which Labour was
re-elected. In 2008 Gordon Brown, faced with a Private Members’ Bill moved by
Labour MP Andrew Miller on rights for agency workers and temps, was calling for
a ‘review’ as a way of wasting yet more time and kicking the need for laws to
protect them into the long grass once again. If these people had been
millionaire tax dodgers, they would have been given what they wanted long ago.
So what’s the deal? Agency workers get equal pay after
they’ve been in the job for 12 weeks. They become entitled to holiday pay after
12 weeks. This is a step forward, but the trade union movement has been
campaigning for equal rights from day one on the job. If you’re doing the same
job, you should be on the same money – from day one. What’s the matter with
that? The CBI has worked out that only about half of all agency workers will be
covered. Of course they were lobbying for rights not to kick in till you’d been
there six months.
Sick pay is not covered by the deal. If you’re sick and
you’re an agency worker, you have to be sick on your own time. Pension rights
do not accrue. Overtime rates are not covered – for that you would have to be
cut into a collective bargaining agreement where you work. You will only be
entitled to maternity provision on the same terms as full-time workers. This is
equal treatment alright, but really all workers should have maternity rights
from day one.
How come the government has finally moved an inch on
workers’ rights? It looks as if the European Union Agency Workers’ Directive is
coming into force. New Labour accepts the inevitable and are trying to give the
Directive the most restrictive reading they can in this country. There will be
legislation in the autumn.
The Directive is actually much more wide-ranging, allowing
for temps to be paid between assignments and for them to be covered by
collective bargaining agreements where they are at work. Needless to say, this
is all unheard of in Britain.
The government is climbing down on the Agency Workers’
Directive so they can preserve their opt-out on the Working Time Directive.
It’s part of a squalid back room deal. They want to keep the right for workers
to be effectively forced to work more than 48 hours a week by employers. They
call it ‘labour market flexibility.’ We call it keeping workers under the
hammer. They claim this has made this country competitive. It’s not obvious how
the increase in agency jobs in food processing, care work and call centres has
made Britain a world leader.
The Tories are snivelling that the deal’s a concession to
the trade unions. That shows what they’ll try to get up to if they get in.
Their employment spokesperson let slip, “(Gordon’s) own Ministers have been
lobbying against this legislation in Parliament and in Brussels…” So bear that
in mind. When New Labour say they’ve got to do right wing anti-working class
stuff because it’s the law from Europe, it is usually because they have been lobbying in Brussels against workers’ rights
and for Thatcherite policies.
The
Engineering Employers’ Federation called the deal a ‘bad day for business’.
More resignedly the CBI described it as the ‘least worst option.’ And the
Federation of Small Business whined about agency fees making temping plus equal
pay an expensive option for employers. Some workers don’t want a full-time
permanent job and can dip in and out of employment. Some employers have peaks
of work that need temporary help to fulfil. But for many bosses, resort to
agency work is just a bad management practice. Some workers have been ‘temping’
at the same place of work for years without ever becoming a worker with full
rights like those on the books. It has become the dominant form of employment in
low paid sectors of the economy such as catering, construction and security
guards. The lack of rights mean agency labour is used to reduce living
standards in these industries still further. That has got to stop. Agency
workers need and deserve the same rights as all other workers.
