Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-11-20-Speech-3-341"
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"en.20021120.11.3-341"2
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"Mr President, I would like to thank the rapporteur most sincerely for her hard work and willingness to reach an agreement, difficult though that path has been and will be.
My group will not be supporting the amendments which oppose this directive, but will generally support the rapporteur. It is quite true that there are many reputable agencies which pay well, which engage in training their staff and which provide very good terms and conditions. These agencies are generally already used to working within a regulated framework. This directive possibly changes part of the regulation.
We have been told by certain major agencies, some of the largest operating in the European Union, that they do not oppose a regulation, which is not what the Confederation of British Industry and others would have us believe. But some of the difficulties raised we found difficult to credit. Some of the agencies have told us that they cannot compare the work done by their staff with that of the end-user company's staff as their agency staff do unique work which is highly skilled and is on a project basis. So, I found myself wondering on what basis, then, is the pay rate set at which the agency charges the end-user company? What percentage of that income is then paid to the worker? They cannot be working in a vacuum. Internal pay rates, some have told us, are confidential. Well, how then do reputable companies perform transparent audits on equal pay for equal work?
I believe that good agencies have nothing to fear from this directive. We would like to think that those who should be worrying are the disreputable ones who exploit the poorly-skilled, or people in areas of high unemployment who have little choice as to who they work for and under which conditions. These include cleaning agencies who employ shifts of temporary night workers and then pay them at training rates for longer than necessary, and companies who effectively employ long-term agency workers at lower rates of pay than permanent staff, and who replace paid staff who leave with agency workers because they can lay them off much more easily and with poorer conditions.
For some strange reason, those agencies have not lobbied us. We need to ensure that we protect the rights of workers who do not have choices and whose agents know that they can exploit that weakness."@en1
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