In February, Labour MPs voted overwhelmingly to give a second reading to a bill which would grant temporary agency workers the same rights as permanent employees. This was despite the government’s longstanding hostility to legislation improving the pay and condition of agency workers.

Last year, a similar bill was obstructed at the second reading, and, within Europe, the UK has been leading the small group of countries blocking the European Commission’s Temporary Agency Worker Directive. 

Temporary agency workers are not employed directly by the company or organisation they work for. They are contracted out to the user-firm by an employment agency. The cleaners in your local hospital are likely to be agency workers, so are the workers processing the cheap chickens that grace our supermarkets. They are everywhere. Even the latest Harry Potter book was printed by workers employed on temporary agency contracts.

Temporary agency employees in Britain are one of the most exploited sections of the European working class thanks to the UK’s highly flexible and deregulated labour market. For both the private and the public sector, temporary agency workers represent a valuable source of low-wage, flexible labour.

This type of work has flourished in the political and economic context of budgetary restraint in the public sector, welfare state cutbacks and labour market deregulation. While this process began in the 1980s under the Conservative government it has continued unchecked under New Labour, resulting in a growing proportion of people working in temporary, insecure and low-paid jobs.

The expansion of this workforce is linked to a retreat from traditional employment contracts and the growing use of “atypical” forms of work. It has undermined the ability of workers to organise effectively against attacks on wages and conditions. Permanent workers fighting against their employer for one contract find themselves divided against temporary workers on a completely different contract and with a completely different boss – even though they all work in the same place. It is divide and rule with knobs on.

Size of the problem

In 1992 agency work accounted for 7% of all temporary employment. By 2001 this had risen to 17%,1 though pinning down the actual numbers of temporary agency workers is difficult. Estimates have varied from 1% of the total workforce to 5% and some figures suggest that on any one day there are well over one million agency staff at work.

Official government figures are likely to miss out the growing numbers of low-paid, and in many cases, migrant workers who are propping up the UK economy. Given temporary agency workers numbered only 50,000 in the mid-1980s,2 the increase is massive.

A number of recent legislative changes have improved the conditions of direct hire temporary workers and part-time workers. But while agency workers are entitled to the employment rights that apply to all workers, including the National Minimum Wage, they are exempt from unfair dismissal and redundancy protection, since this only applies to employees. UK law distinguishes between “employees” and “workers”. Temporary agency workers fall into the “worker” category, making them an attractive option for big business on the look-out for cheap, disposable labour.

Permanent employment remains an essential characteristic of the UK labour market, but atypical forms of employment are growing and present a challenge for the labour movement. Flexibility in the workforce is a useful mechanism for capital. It is divisive and can be used as a disciplinary mechanism. It is part of a growing trend rooted in the defeats organised workers have suffered since the 1980s.

Employer-driven flexibility is a consequence of the weakening of the working class and a factor in its inability to rebuild its strength. 

The growth of the “non-standard” worker

The growth of temporary agency work is just one consequence of the structural changes that UK capitalism underwent in the latter part of the twentieth century. The continuing decline of manufacturing industry (with it the disappearance of key militant sectors of the organised working class) and the growth of the service sector have been accompanied by a general shift towards the contracting-out of specific areas of business and service functions. This trend has affected a wide range of employment: cleaning, transport, logistics, human resources, IT, payroll and so on. A more recent phenomenon however, is the use of agency workers in core functions, in manufacturing for example.

One school of thought, with its origins in late British Stalinism’s profound pessimism regarding the changes in the working class, is that the growth of this non-standard work is a manifestation of “post-industrialisation” or “post-Fordism”. It supposedly signals the arrival of a new stage of capitalism marked by a higher level of class fragmentation as a result of the inexorable forward march of the processes of neo-liberal globalisation. It is a process which renders the working class divided and impotent.

This bleak view ignores the fact that flexible and unregulated employment relations are not new. They represent a social and political regression to forms of employment that were common in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The post-Second World War social compromise in the West between unions and employers, frequently institutionalised in tri-partite bodies, moderated the domination of capital over labour by legitimising the role of labour in negotiating secure employment and social protection. It gave rise to the “male breadwinner” model of employment, which became the basis of western tax and welfare systems in the 1950s.

Residual, flexible forms of employment were confined to peripheral sectors of the workforce. Temporary employment was either a function of the seasonal or uneven daily/weekly pattern of some areas of production such as agriculture, hospitality and dock labour, or it was associated with those sections of workers said to have “marginal labour market attachment”, such as women combining paid work with their unpaid work in the family, or students working to finance their studies. Additionally, temporary contracts were used by employers to supplement their workforce during cyclical peaks in demand.

Although temporary agency work still serves these functions, it now covers occupations previously associated with the standard employment relationship, and long durations of assignments suggest that in some cases employers are using agency staff to replace costlier permanent employees. This new development is something the unions need to wake up to, and fast.

The new world of work – a contented flexible workforce?

At the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Gordon Brown once again emphasised his commitment to a flexible workforce as a key instrument for UK capitalism. Government rhetoric presents flexibility as a benevolent gift to workers who want more control over their working lives and who are making an active choice in becoming “permanent temps” which, conveniently, also suits the needs of business.

Both the government and the bosses’ organisations argue that temporary agency work meets the needs of employers and workers; a perfect “win-win” situation in which the outcome is increased competitiveness and a happier workforce. According to the Department of Trade and Industry, temporary workers “are among the happiest in the workforce”.3 Similarly the REC, the organisation which represents temporary staffing agencies, claims that 77% of temporary agency workers are satisfied with their work.

A common academic account of the flexible workforce reinforces this view. This approach draws on the post-Fordist paradigm that technological change, combined with the knowledge economy that new technology engenders, are leading to the end of alienation. Contrary to Marx’s prediction that capitalist accumulation would lead to de-skilling and the increasing subordination of workers to the discipline of capitalism we are allegedly witnessing a growth in “autonomy” and “empowerment” – the buzzwords in this new flexible world of work.4

In the “knowledge-intensive” economy, an increasingly skilled workforce (dubbed the neo-proletariat by the French philosopher, André Gorz) is able to enjoy greater employment mobility and command high wages by selling their labour power to the highest bidder in a knowledge-hungry labour market.

Some temporary agency workers appear to fit this picture of a happy, flexible workforce – engineers, consultants, IT workers, nurses and technicians who make up the professional, skilled sector of agency workers. But they represent only a tiny percentage of the temporary agency workforce.5 The question of choice is also a red herring, since almost half of all temporary agency workers would prefer permanent employment.6

Although technological changes have facilitated the use of agency work in some sectors, the real propeller is not technological innovation. Even less is it “employee preference”. It is rather the policies of successive British governments. For example, in the 1980s and early 1990s, Tory deregulation made the UK a magnet for Europe’s call centre sector. Privatisation accelerated this process with ex-public utilities such British Telecom having call centres staffed entirely by temporary agency workers.7 The temporary staffing industry also received a boost in the mid-1990s with the abolition of statutory registration requirements. 

Migrant labour – UK capitalism’s golden goose

Today agency labour is becoming more and more reliant on migrant workers. Ethnic minorities are overrepresented in agency work, accounting for 19% of workers whilst only constituting 8% of the total workforce. Not all of these will be migrant workers, but a good proportion will be, especially at the low-economy end of agency work. In addition to black and ethnic minority migrant workers, there are a growing number of Eastern European workers.

The rapidly changing contours of the low-skilled, low-waged workforce are a deliberate consequence of government policy. Despite a tough line on immigration, New Labour has been careful not to restrict the ready supply of cheap labour to UK bosses. Three years after the 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act, the government came up with its policy of “managed migration”, aimed at facilitating the arrival of migrant workers, or as the government put it, to “manage legal migration in the interests of the UK economy”.8 

Consequently, the number of work permits increased from 40,000 a year in the mid-1990s to 200,000 a year in 2004, aimed at filling vacancies in sectors identified by bosses’ organisations, for example, hospitality and food processing. Clearly, years of attacks on welfare benefits had not succeeded in driving UK workers into low-paid jobs.

Behind the managed migration policy lies the government’s commitment to a flexible labour market, enabling capitalists to drive down working conditions and wages. And, of course, not all migrant workers are equal. Those on high-skilled permits are granted the right to settle, whereas the low skilled (or more precisely those in low-skilled work) are subject to highly restrictive temporary visas, with no rights to benefits.

Since 2004, many temporary workers from non-EU countries are becoming surplus to requirements, due to the arrival of Eastern European workers.

It is becoming increasingly clear that there is a phenomenal range of nationalities working in the UK’s low paid economy. Research carried out by the University of London highlighted an acute “migrant division of labour” in the UK’s capital with a disproportionate number of London’s low-paid jobs being are carried out by migrant workers, many of whom are agency workers.9

Migrants make up 35% of London’s working age population but they account for 46% of its lower-skilled workers. Even more striking is the composition of the workforce. The study identified 56 nationalities in their sample of 341 workers.10 Of the London Underground cleaners they interviewed, 95% were migrant workers. In all, 90% of the interviewees in contract cleaning, hospitality, and food processing were foreign-born workers, with half having arrived in the UK in the previous five years.

The study also identified further segregation along ethnic lines: 75% of the interviewees working as cleaners on the London underground were Black Africans, whereas Latin Americans tended to be concentrated in office cleaning, with Eastern Europeans working in the hotel and hospitality sectors.

Pay and conditions for these workers are a shocking indictment of New Labour’s reverence for modern capitalism. Red Ken may crow about London’s transport system but subcontracted agency staff are cleaning London’s underground on rates of pay which are below the Mayor’s own London Living Wage, with no access to sick pay and no extra pay for overtime. Most do not receive an annual wage rise and were on an annual salary of around £10,000.

New waves of migrants tend to be employed on even worse conditions, thus creating tensions with in-house and other agency workers. Recent migrants working in the hotel sector are likely to experience significantly worse conditions than other workers. The TUC has begun documenting the Dickensian conditions and salaries of workers from Eastern Europe, with examples of workers earning £1.50 an hour.11

Research by UNISON paints a similar picture of agency workers across a broad range of sectors, including universities and museums. Outside of London, the food and processing industry is increasingly staffed by migrant agency workers. In the South West for example, a survey of companies showed that migrant workers made up 21% of the workforce.

Migrant agency workers present UK capitalism with a major new source for super-exploitation, creating a layer of workers with virtually none of the protection accorded to workers on permanent contracts. East European workers have opened up new avenues of exploitation for profit-hungry bosses. The UK’s deregulated labour market has facilitated the process of super-exploitation of these workers.

The gains for the bosses are huge: they can access a large pool of workers, many of whom have high levels of skills and qualifications. The employment status of these workers means they are unlikely to resist deteriorating conditions of work. They can also use the existence of a two-tier workforce to drive down the conditions of permanent staff. In addition, competition for scarce resources in local communities can divide workers further, create a climate of xenophobia and fear which hinders united class action.

A chance for the revival of grassroots unionism

Are we too fragmented and diverse to rebuild our organisations? Of course not. But to bounce back we need to take stock of the challenges facing us, understand the trends that are changing the face of the working class and act accordingly.

Recent union campaigns to support the rights of migrant agency workers, and to expose abuses, are long overdue. One of the reasons that temporary workers are notoriously difficult to unionise is the lack of interest from unions, due to their opposition to temporary work. However, union leaders are in no small measure to blame for the growth in casualisation. From selling out workers’ struggles to joining in the New Labour mantra of “competitiveness”, our union leaders have failed to prevent the spread of temporary contracts and the consequent the down grading of working conditions for all workers.

Nonetheless, the recent national union campaigns on this issue and the bill to extend rights to agency workers are welcome. But the real challenge is to find the means to organise workers to fight for their rights themselves – the only guarantee that they will not be short-changed.

Temporary agency workers, and in particular, migrant workers, are a potential source of militancy given the excessive exploitation they experience. As in previous eras they can be part of the process of union revival. But we must be alert to the specific problems posed by the need to organise migrant workers.

For example, today’s migrant workers face a very different situation from those of previous generations, many of whom found permanent employment in unionised workplaces, in particular in the public sector. But their employment and immigration status means it can difficult for them to take the lead in challenging their conditions of work, either individually or collectively.

Historically the labour movement was built on the basis of rising to challenges. The case of the London Living Wage Campaign demonstrates the kind of movement that can integrate the most vulnerable agency workers into the wider labour movement and working class community. The campaign operated on a number of fronts, mobilising trade unions and community organisations, to organise workers in order to target the “real employers” of these workers – the NHS, finance organisations and universities.

As a result, subcontracted workers were able to fight for significant improvements in terms and conditions of work. These workers included 3,000 contract cleaners in the financial powerhouses of Canary Wharf, as well as 1,000 domestic and catering staff in hospitals.

For the initiators of this campaign, this was a new model of trade unionism in action – community unionism. Community unionism has emerged as a response to the challenge posed by a fragmented class and the marginalisation of the most vulnerable, brought about by rampant globalisation.

By stepping outside of the workplace and into the community, activists are able to reach workers who would otherwise not have access to unions, due to their geographical dispersal as well the ambiguous nature of their employment contract.12 Community unionism brings together different grassroots organisations, pooling resources with the aim of enhancing workers rights and supporting struggles in various ways.

This intersection between workplace and community was visible in industrial struggles as recently as the 1984/85 miners’ strike. The strike could not have been waged by the union had it not been for the support of the communities to which the miners belonged. However, successive defeats and the decline of the big bastions of the organised working class have eroded community based working class organisation.

Rebuilding working class strength and consciousness today will need an even greater emphasis on locally based organisations of struggle. Community-based union organisations - pooling the resources of different unions and bringing in local activists - could pave the way to unionisation drives amongst agency and migrant workers.

Such organisations could also take up related issues of services and accommodation, to support migrant workers and ease tensions where they occur within local communities by taking up the fight for improved public services for all.

Where communities are being transformed through capitalism’s quest for cheap labour, the labour movement needs to find a means of integrating new workers and uniting the class around its common interests. In doing this we will have to ensure that class is the unifying factor that brings together workers from different nationalities, ethnicities and religious cultures.

And on the basis of such steps forward we can lay the basis for the national organisation of such workers and their national integration into the wider movement.

The example of the London Living Wage Campaign demonstrates that it is possible to organise workers in the low-paid, flexible workforce, and that working class communities can, when united and strong, resist the race to the bottom that globalisation is foisting upon us.

Endnotes

1. Stanworth, C. and Druker, J. (2004), ‘Temporary agency labour in the UK’, in Burgess, J. and Connell, J. (eds) International Perspectives on Temporary Agency Work, (London, Routledge) p54.

2. Forde, C. and Slater, G. (2005), ‘Agency Working in Britain: Character, Consequences and Regulation’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 43:2, pp249-272.

3. Department of Trade and Industry (2006), ‘Success at Work: protecting vulnerable workers, supporting good employers’.

4. In fact, recent EU research on the changing nature of work found that in the period between 1995 and 2000, there has been a decrease in the complexity of work tasks. Workers have less possibility of choosing or changing their order of tasks and methods of working. In other words jobs have become more routine. See Birindellie, L. and Rustichelli, E. (2005), ‘The Transformation of Work?’

5. Forde, C. and Slater, G. (2005), Op Cit, p257.

6. Labour Force Survey, 2006.

7. Stanworth, C. and Druker, J. (2004), Op Cit, p61.

8. May, J., Wills, J., Kavita, D., Yara, E., Herbert, J. and McIlwaine, C. (2006), ‘The British State and London’s Migrant Division of Labour’, Department of Geography, University of London, p156.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. TUC (2004), ‘Migrant Agency Workers’

12. Wills, J. and Simms, M. (2004), ‘Building reciprocal community unionism in the UK’, Capital and Class, Spring 2004.

public sector

Public work, private recruitment

1

The restructuring of the public sector throughout the 1980s and 1990s provided an important stimulus to the temporary staffing industry. Privatisation and contracting out of “non-core” services led to the growth of labour supply via agencies, and the subsequent deterioration of wages and conditions of many workers who had previously benefited from the protection and benefits associated with a permanent contract.

During the 1990s many groups such as domestic workers in hospitals ended up doing the same job on agency contracts with lower wages and no pension rights and no sick pay.

Since then, the number of public sector workers recruited through agencies has soared. NHS expenditure on temporary work (mainly agency work) tripled from £216 million to £628 million between 1997-2002.1 A similar process has taken place in local government.

The TUC estimates that in some of the larger Local Authorities up to 20% of the workforce are agency workers, with rates being particularly high in care work.2 The number of social workers on temporary agency contracts in England has grown phenomenally in recent years; between 2003 and 2004 alone, agency staff rose from 4506 full-time equivalent staff to 6981 – a 50% increase.

There is evidence to suggest that professional staff on agency contracts have been able to command higher salaries, and are choosing to leave permanent employment. But this is in the context of deteriorating conditions of permanent employment in the public sector.

Studies have shown, for example that social workers are abandoning permanent contracts in response to intensification of work and lack of autonomy.3

So the growth of agency work amongst professional staff in the public sector is due to high turnover rates and a need to turn to agencies to plug the gap.4 Similar studies of nurses have found that, for many, the negative experiences of full-time, permanent NHS employment is driving them to temporary work agencies.5

These examples are hardly confirmation of the “empowerment” thesis put forward by the post-Fordists, enthralled by the demise of “jobs-for-life” and the prospect of workers creating their own “portfolios” with unlimited career mobility in an employee-driven flexible labour market. For these workers, agency work represents an escape from the reality of public sector employment after years of neo-liberal marketisation pressures, not a positive embracing of some mythical “autonomy”.

At the other end of the scale, the strategy of using agencies in low-skilled work as a way of keeping down labour costs has led to scenes reminiscent of the 1930s.

Last year refuse workers in Salford took successful strike action over the council’s use of agency staff, some of whom had been working for the council for up to five years. They had to turn up for work at 5:30 every morning to see if they were needed. If not they received a small cash payment for getting out of bed. If they were set to work, their hourly wage was well under that of permanent staff.

The use of untrained agency staff also has implications for the quality of our services. Last year, poor quality in mail delivery was attributed to agency staff. Agency staff in the social care sector can seriously undermine care where continuity of care workers is essential to high quality service.

The victory of the Salford strikers in achieving tenure for agency workers demonstrates that the casualisation of work in not an inevitable process. Political will and action can halt the assault on our gains in the workplace.

Endnotes

1. TUC (2007), “Agency Workers: Counting the Cost of Flexibility”

2. I Kirkpatrick and K Hoque, “A retreat from permanent employment? Accounting for the rise of temporary Agency Work in UK Public Services”, Work, Employment and Society, Vol 20 No 4 2006, p653

3. Ibid

4. H Conley, “Modernisation or Casualisation? Numerical Flexibility in public services?”, Capital and Class, 89 2006, p37

5. A De Ruyter, “Should I stay or should I go? Agency nursing in the UK”, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 2007 Vol. 18, No. 9: 1666-1682

factfile

The reality of temporary agency work

1

A TUC report published last year pointed out that the lack of parity between temporary agency workers and permanent staff amounted to institutionalised discrimination against the women, migrant and young workers who make up the bulk of the low-end of temporary agency work.1

TUC research shows that more than half of agency workers are denied the same holiday rights as permanent staff, despite the fact that many agency workers stay for many months in one company. Similarly, two-thirds do not have any right to sick pay.

Problems accumulate for those at the lower end of the wage scale. Only a third of those on the minimum wage said that they were treated fairly by their agencies, and nearly two-thirds said that working for an agency hindered their ability to raise problems with their working conditions.

An undercover operation to investigate agency work in the manufacturing sector by a member of Unite revealed a picture of a “shadowy and insecure world of work” where even skilled manufacturing workers were paid minimum hourly rates of pay and receive no workplace training or safety equipment. There are numerous similar examples throughout manufacturing:

1

A&P shipbuilders, Tyneside: Agency workers, mainly Polish, are paid £5 an hour less than permanent staff. Their contracts can be terminated with a day’s notice. The agency firm which supplies the agency workers is part owned by A&P.

1

BMW: at its Hams Hall engine plant in Birmingham, there are 700 shop floor workers, two-thirds of whom are agency workers, paid £5 an hour less than permanent staff. At the Cowley plant in Oxford, out of a total workforce of 4,700, 1,200 are agency workers. Some of the agency workers have been “temping” at Hams Hall for more than five years.

1

Quebecor World Printing: Human resource strategy at the company seems to consist of replacing its lower skilled permanent workforce with Polish and Lithuanian agency workers, working longer shifts and on significantly less pay. Quebecor prints the Guardian and the Observer.

1

Corus steel, Teeside: self-employed agency labour is recruited on zero hours contracts. Corus employs 23,500 workers throughout the UK, and uses up to 10,000 agency staff.

Endnotes

1. TUC (2007), ‘Agency Workers: Counting the Cost of Flexibility’, in Kirkpatrick, I. and Hoque, K. (2006), ‘A Retreat from Permanent Employment? Accounting for the Rise of Temporary Agency Work in UK Public Services’, Work, Employment and Society, Vol. 20, No. 4. p659.