Read this article in:
10 July, 2008
What is your experience with contract and agency labour in Denmark?
Firstly, the Danish Trade Unions are organised by trade. This means, for example, that you can have five different trade unions representing the employees in a power plant. The Danish Union of Electricians organises all skilled electrical workers in Denmark. We have collective agreements with most companies in the country, with some dating back to early in the 20th century.
Secondly, contract and agency work is still a growing phenomenon in Denmark. Our union has three strategies for dealing with the issue. First of all, we try to agree on equal rights and equal pay for agency workers in the collective agreements. Already 10 or 15 years ago, we agreed on an appendix in the largest collective agreement between Danish Industries (DI) and CO-Industry, covering 9 unions, with regard to agency workers that are employed in blue-collar jobs. Through this appendix, agency workers in power plants receive the same rights and benefits as their permanent colleagues from day one.
This appended agreement, unfortunately, only covers the blue-collar workers, not white- collar, or professional or technical workers. This is something we are still fighting for, and we hope that the new European Directive on Agency Work will help in this. Even though blue-collar agency workers have, at present, equal rights from day one, there still are some problems. Many of the social rights, such as the right to full sick pay, or the right to training and education, call for a minimum employment period of 6 or 9 months. Agency workers often don’t work long enough to get that far.
Dansk El-Forbund Gen. Sec. Jørgen Juul Rasmussen
What is your union’s experience on how employers handle their responsibilities regarding agency workers?
Danish employers try hard to find different ways to ignore these agreements. A few years ago, for example, we saw a sudden increase in the use of electricians as agency workers in the construction sector. In our agreement that covers this work (DEF-Tekniq), agency work is not mentioned. This is where our second strategy takes hold. We take the employers’ organisation to court to enforce our contracts and the law. And so far, we have always won. In this particular case, the court decided that the agency workers should be paid according to the general stipulations within the DEF-Tekniq agreement. If not, it would have been seen as a violation of the agreement. They hold that it is the responsibility of primary employers to treat contract or agency workers the same as the permanent employees.
Now, employers will try to circumvent this. They will claim that the workers they hire are subcontractors themselves, or self-employed people. We continue to bring such claims before the courts and so far, we have been winning.
How difficult is it to organise contract or agency workers into your existing union structures?
This is exactly the third strategy. We are very pro-active in organising agency workers or so-called subcontractors into our existing unions. We approach these workers inside their companies and on building sites. The problem we encounter is that contract workers of a specific company might be spread out widely over a geographic area, and oftentimes they switch between company to company, so the problem of reaching them is hard.
In the near future, we will keep taking employers who attempt to avoid their responsibilities to labour court; we will continue to organise contract and agency workers; and where we can, and we encourage more unions in Denmark to actively organise these workers as well. Until now, we are the only union in Denmark to do so. But we hope that more unions in Denmark will join us.