EMPLOYERS’ GROUPS say they will strongly oppose any legislation that would give agency workers full employment rights after a short period in a job.
In a presentation to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment yesterday, Ibec, Isme, the CIF and Chambers Ireland separately spoke of their concerns over measures that would grant agency workers the same rights as employees doing a similar job in a company following a period of six weeks.
Ibec claimed unions were more interested in protecting “sector pay norms established through collective bargaining” than a real concern for temporary agency workers.
Isme described aspects of proposed legislation covering agency workers as “absolutely crazy”, adding that certain equal measures would put huge pressure on small businesses and would hammer “another nail in the coffin” of the Irish economy.
Employers’ representatives also said agency workers were already catered for by existing laws and grievance processes and there were calls by the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) for actual evidence – in place of anecdotal accounts – that outlined how workers were exploited in Ireland at present.
Their submissions to the committee come after the Irish Congress of Trade Unions said legislation to help bolster the conditions of agency workers would “most assuredly” be a deal-breaker in the current national pay talks.
Isme chief executive Mark Fielding said the Protection of Employees (Agency Workers) Bill 2008 was “unwarranted, unworkable and unwelcome” and would place an onerous financial and bureaucratic burden on employers.
“It is akin to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, where 99 per cent of compliant SMEs will be hampered,” said Mr Fielding.
Ibec’s Brendan McGinty said agency workers already had similar protections to permanent workers under unfair dismissals, redundancy, holiday pay, minimum wage and working time procedures and said the six-week provision to staff up agency workers was “worse than useless” as a time period.
Mr McGinty said his members were “extremely concerned” about the implications of the draft EU Temporary Agency Workers’ directive. Ibec would not sign up to an arrangement that would worsen employer flexibility in current economic conditions.
He said the use of temporary workers was most prominent in sectors such as food processing, construction, manufacturing, transport and haulage, hotels and catering, but the directive would seriously “hinder employers capacity to respond to fluctuating business needs”. He added that Irish union pronouncements about the “alleged plight” of agency workers had not been “validated”.
Responding to committee members, who said they heard many stories of workers in general being abused by their employers, the CIF’s Eddie Keenan said the federation would not stand over exploitation in any way in the construction sector.