BEERG: Global Unions Move to Expand Collective Bargaining Rights for Temporary Agency Workers

As reported in the BEERG Global Labor Newsletter, the Global Unions alliance recently updated its joint principles on temporary agency work to reflect an underlying position that such work is fundamentally illegitimate.  A recent presentation by the International Union of Foodworkers (a member of Global Unions), even went so far as to call agency work a human rights abuse.  According to Jim Baker, Coordinator of the Council of Global Unions, the major reason why the unions have amended the principles on temporary work agencies is that “it was clear in ILO meetings that private employment agencies were being treated as a ‘sector’ even though they supplied, and in many cases, employed workers in multiple economic sectors.  In that context, ‘sectoral’ collective bargaining might divide them from the sectors in which they were working; resulting in significant differences in salaries and conditions of temporary and permanent workers, who might be performing the same tasks and working side by side.”  Baker further added: “The updated Principles make explicit that temporary work agencies do not constitute an economic sector and state that agency workers must be specifically guaranteed their right to negotiate the terms and conditions of employment with the user enterprises which effectively control them.”  In late 2011, a meeting at the ILO between the unions and the agency work employers’ organization broke down in acrimony when the unions began the meeting by refusing to accept that the employers constituted a valid sectoral group.  The updated union principles say:

• 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.