Global unions take a stand on temporary employment agencies

GLOBAL: In recent decades, the use of temporary agencies to supply workers has exploded all over the world, spreading also to sectors and occupations that had previously depended on directly employed workers. Not only do temporary agency workers typically receive lower pay and fewer benefits, when the financial crisis rapidly became an employment crisis, temporary agency workers were among its first victims.

 The expansion of temporary agency labour, together with other forms of temporary, casual and precarious employment has been promoted by international organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the OECD as "labour market flexibility". It has contributed to a general erosion of workers' ability to exercise their rights to join trade unions and bargain collectively with their employers, thereby posing a major challenge to the labour movement.

Although there are varying approaches taken by trade unions in different countries and sectors to dealing with temporary employment agencies, ranging from total bans to partial bans to strict regulation, all Global Unions have reached agreement on a number of key principles. They include:

• the primary form of employment should be permanent, open-ended and direct;
• agency workers should be covered under the same collective bargaining agreement as other workers in the user enterprise: temporary agency workers should receive equal treatment in all respects;
• the use of temporary agencies should not increase the gender gap on wages, social protections, and conditions;
• temporary work agencies must not be used to eliminate permanent and direct employment relationships; and
• the use of agency workers should never be used to weaken trade unions or to undermine organizing or collective bargaining rights.

For the full text of "Global Union Principles on Temporary Work Agencies," click here.

Full text of the statement is published on the Global Unions' website.