Temporary workers and decent work in The Netherlands

“Temporary agency workers, which is perhaps the prime example of a group of workers who are involved with the increasing flexibilisation of work, are fortunately now receiving more and more attention from trades unions”, says Marcel Nuyten of FNV Bondgenoten. He continues, “The idea that temporary workers are not a separate group but belong to the company where they work just as much as other workers is gaining ever more ground.

That was recently to be seen, when, as a result of the current financial crisis, the temporary agency workers employed at Nedcar and other companies would  have been fired wholesale. The reduction in working hours which had been requested for other workers would not apply to temporary agency workers and they were in danger of quite simply losing their jobs. Then agreements with them were made so that Nedcar’s temporary workers received a financial reward and in other companies temporary workers were sometimes actually directly hired so that they could take part in the working hours reduction programme, just like all the other staff members.”

The three biggest problems which face temporary workers

• No equal pay for equal work

Temporary agency workers do not automatically have the right to receive the same pay for doing the same job. It is particularly among older workers that you see that their wages are less than those of permanent staff. Younger workers all start at about the same level but the longer you work for a company then the wages tend to increase. But this does not apply, or hardly at all, to temporary agency workers. What is more, the number of older people who work as temporary agency workers has risen enormously in recent years. Some people work as well as getting a pension. But there are also people who are fired and then have to accept work at a lower level and for a lower wage than they were accustomed. It is also the case that some people who may have worked for many years for a company have no trade diplomas with which to prove their skills. And so, if they are fired, they can not easily find another job which is appropriate to their level of skills.

• High level of job insecurity

Temporary agency workers for a long time have a so-called day contract and can be fired from one day to the next. That is called Phase A officially. For youngsters with a holiday job or students with a part time job that is usually not a problem. But there are also many people who, together with their families, are totally dependent on their temporary agency jobs. The agencies make a lot of play with the idea that a temporary agency job is a stepping stone to a permanent job. But that only tends to be true for some highly qualified individuals. The people at the bottom of the labour market hardly tend to rise because they frequently have little or no education nor diplomas.

• Absence of training opportunities

Temporary agency workers tend not to take part in the normal training programmes given within a company. And those training opportunities that are available are usually aimed at the  more promising temporary agency workers, those who already have had a certain degree of education. FNV Bondgenoten, for this reason aims at obtaining training opportunities for temporary workers who have not had a proper education or whose education was not completed. By giving training opportunities to these people, their chances of getting a permanent job are thus increased.

A better position for temporary agency workers

How then does FNV Bondgenoten try to improve the position of temporary agency workers? Marcel Nuyten explains: “In the first place by getting agreement on a good collective labour agreement and seeing to it that this agreement is actually respected in practice. We have recently made two such agreements. In them we have been able to arrange that more agency workers get the same wage from the employing company. That is they get the same pay for doing the same work. In addition we have also been able to improve their rights to get training opportunities.”

Improving the Dutch laws is a second approach to improving the position of temporary agency workers. “In The Netherlands anyone can in principle start a trade union and make a collective labour agreement. In this way, the Association of Labour Intermediaries (VIA) recently signed a collective labour agreement with a hitherto unknown union by which East European workers get paid at a much lower rate in the Netherlands than Dutch workers. It seems crazy that this is possible but our legal system does allow it. You would not think that this was the case in a country like The Netherlands, but here we do actually have many yellow unions and that should be made known internationally. FNV Bondgenoten wants to stimulate the discussion about this. Because so much is permitted within Dutch law, flexibilisation is given a further stimulus. And we are trying to take legal action  about these less than bona fide collective labour agreements.”

Better working conditions instead of more security

“Pushing back the tide of flexibilisation will not work. In negotiations about new collective labour agreements we push for improving working conditions in exchange for the increase in flexibilisation. We try to obtain better wages, better pension rights and better training opportunities. You might think that we could best help temporary agency workers by trying to help them get a permanent job more quickly, so that then they do not have that insecurity. But this is just not true. The temporary agency workers themselves would rather that we do not try to get them more security, for example by putting the right to get a permanent job after a shorter period  into a collective labour agreement. That often has the opposite effect, as employers tend to fire agency workers quicker, so as to avoid this provision. Instead of this we focus on improving wages and training opportunities.

Our aims in the future are: pushing harder for the same wage for the same job. We want the minimum hourly rate which is paid by the hiring companies to agency workers rise from €8.50 to €10, which we have recently achieved in the cleaning industry. And we want to improve access to training and the trade training opportunities currently only for permanent staff to be made available to temporary agency workers as well.

We can not by means of the collective labour agreement for temporary agency workers achieve a higher degree of security for agency workers. But through the collective labour agreements made with the hiring companies (=INLENERS?) we can see that happening. And that is what we aim to do more in the future. You can, for example, put into the collective labour agreement made with a company, that someone who has worked for 9 out of the previous 12 months has the right to get a permanent job. You can also lay down what wages  someone will get from their very first day in such an agreement. The collective labour agreement with the temporary agencies will thus be the basis, the safety net, but you can frequently find ways to organise better conditions for the people than that.”