European Parliament puts agency workers’ jobs at risk

12.00.00am GMT Thu 21st Nov 2002

West Midlands Liberal Democrat MEP Liz Lynne has criticised the European Parliament’s decision today to pass the Temporary Workers Agency Directive as “a giant leap in the dark”.

Liz, a member of the European Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs Committee who was speaker in the debate on behalf of the European Liberal Democratic and Reform Party, has been calling for the European Commission to undertake a comprehensive impact assessment on the legislation.

Failing that, she had called for the section insisting that agency workers should be given the same pay as the permanent workers in their place of employment to be removed or that the new rules should only apply to agency workers who have been in employment for 12 months.

However, a coalition of Socialists and most of the European People’s Party voted down all her assessments in the Parliament, particularly one on referring the proposal back to the commission along with her amendment calling for a comprehensive impact amendment. The directive was finally adopted with only a few changes, none of which will have a significant impact on the UK anyway.

Commenting, Liz Lynne said:

“All I have ever asked for is that new legislation be properly researched by the Commission before the Parliament and Council are asked to debate it. At its heart, the issue here is not the rights and wrongs of granting employment rights to agency workers, which I am in favour of, but ensuring that the laws passed at the EU level are the most workable that they can be.

“How anybody can object to comprehensive impact assessments beggars belief. It is deeply regrettable to me that the Parliament voted for this directive today. It amounts to a giant leap in the dark. This one-size-fits-all directive fails to recognise the wide range of different practices across the EU, from Greece, which has only recently made temporary worker agencies legal, to the UK and Netherlands where it has long been established practice.

“My great fear is that the smaller agencies will be priced out of the market by this directive and thousands of worker’s jobs will be put at risk. This is not a game, and when making far-reaching decisions on an EU level, we ought to err on the side of caution.”