Agency worker law might not protect most agency workers

If agency workers were given the same rights as full time employees after a year - as the CBI has argued for - then three quarters of agency workers would still be excluded from protection, a new report has revealed. 

The study, Agency working in the UK: what do we know?, has been conducted by academics from the universities of Leeds, Bradford and Kent. It coincides with discussions in Parliament over a Private Members’ Bill, which would grant agency workers equal treatment to permanently employed workers in comparable jobs.

The study found that the average length of employment undertaken by an agency worker is 4.5 months, with 73% in employment for less than a year. Even a restriction of six weeks for entitlement to equal treatment, as proposed by the European Commission in a draft directive on agency work, would exclude more than one in five from protection.

The Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill has now gone to committee stage in the House of Commons. Dr Gary Slater, one of the authors of the report and senior lecturer in Economics in the School of Social and International Studies at the University of Bradford, told Workplace Law Network he thinks legislation to protect agency workers is now definitely on the cards: 

“If it doesn’t happen at the UK level there is the European draft directive; it was blocked, but there may be some movement on it. I think something will happen [in regards to legislation for agency workers] and in a sense it has to happen, because this is one group that is unprotected.

“Fixed term contract workers and part-time workers have some rights; this group hasn’t, which leaves them exposed.”

Slater admits that costs for employers would rise if agency workers were given equal rights, but said the issue for employers should be why they are using agency work in the first place:

“Legislation won’t affect the flexibility for short term cover; it may make it slightly more expensive and mean that [employers] have got to think about their manpower planning a bit more carefully perhaps, but [the issue] is really where you’ve got long term, ongoing relationships that are staffed by agency workers.

“Some agency workers have a long tenure, so really why should they be paid less for doing comparable work? It is leading to concerns about undercutting of standards and flexibility on the cheap. Equal treatment will raise costs but block off this flexibility on the cheap.”

Slater’s advice to employers is to look at their staffing practices before going for the easy option of cheap labour, or voicing concern about what equal treatment for agency workers would cost them:

“There were a lot of scare stories around the impact of the National Minimum Wage but that has just not come to pass, and what employers have done is react [to the minimum wage] by improving training, looking at their own labour productivity and trying to improve that to absorb these costs.

“What we find in the report is that agency workers have very little access to training at all, and again this is a way that these slight rises in costs might be absorbed – by looking at training, productivity improvements and manpower planning.”