Cue squealing agency piggies… 10 June 2008
Original post 20 May:
Excellent news today with reports that agency workers will be given the same employment rights as permanent staff after 12 weeks under proposals agreed between the government and unions.
Naturally, so-called “employers groups” and the recruitment industry are squealing like the pigs they are at the thought of their trough running dry.
As they should be. The 12-week law will force a change in British business that few companies are prepared to handle. For far too long, companies have used the lack of protective legislation for agency workers to act like welfare junkies in the benefits line. They have been able to get away with shoddy or nonexisting management, piss-poor planning, and a contemptuous approach to human resources knowing that an agency temp could always be brought in to plaster over their incompetence. Noises of concern, disquiet, or questions from the temp would result in a no-strings, no-goodbye sacking. They’re just temps, after all.
The facts are simple:
No company which plans properly needs temps for more than 12 weeks.
No company which understands human resources needs temps for more than 12 weeks.
No company with competent management needs temps for more than 12 weeks.
Any excuses or denials of those facts are just so much squealing.
Look at the case of my husband, who only recently was given a permanent role in the company he had been temping in for 16 months. When we became a family, I was on my own at home with a three day old baby because he didn’t even get time off for that. Before that, he spent nearly nine years as an uncontracted temp at IBM. The promise of a permanent job was always just around the corner, but eventually they shut up shop altogether and sent his job to Hungary. That was almost a decade with no rights, no sick time, no holiday time, no pensions, no managerial processes such as performance reviews, no right to ask questions, and the knowledge that the slightest slip-up - even imaginary - could have him out on the corner without the right to collect his coffee mug.
Both companies claimed that not taking him on permanently was because they could not afford to. And that’s what’s so offensive about employers claiming that agency staff save money. They are already paying the full amount to the agency that they would be paying to him as an employee, but the employee gets only 50% of that money, if they’re lucky, and no benefits.
The rest of the money, and the only benefits, go to the army of brainless, untalented bimbos who call themselves “recruitment consultants” because they have completed a two-week in-house training programme on aggressive ways to reach sales targets. These are the scum who told me I was greedy and worthless for questioning them (First People Solutions); who told me that my university degree doesn’t count because it didn’t come from the UK (Hudson Recruitment); who edited and censored my CV past recognition to force me into a job a 12 year old could do (Hays Recruitment); who sent me into physically threatening situations without a second thought (Hudson Recruitment); who sacked me for requesting training and had me pick up my desk belongings in a carrier bag (Search Consultancy); who made me sit on hold to a call centre for half an hour because they had screwed up my pay (Hays Recruitment); who did not issue my statutory holiday pay for almost a year (Hudson Recruitment); who phoned me up to scream in a rage because I’d taken a day off (Cuthbert Recruitment); who phoned me up to scream in a rage because I’d attended a midwife appointment (Hays Recruitment); who ran false listings for jobs which didn’t exist and suckered me into registering for them (HR Consultancy); who told me I had not been selected for a job when in fact they had forgotten to send the company my CV in the first place (Bruce Murray).
Agencies have made an industry out of keeping our workplaces stunted, backwards, and cynical, and the lack of rights for their workers means they’ve been laughing every step of the way. All the while, my husband and I lived hand to mouth for years because agencies are “just the way things are done.” It makes me sick to think of how much some bubblehead was paid over those nine years for his labour - and for doing what? Smirking while helping IBM to sack all its subcontractor staff at 5 PM and rehire them under a different subcontractor banner at 9 AM the next day, to sit in the same seats doing the same jobs, as a way of getting around employment legislation?
With employers now having 12 weeks to put up or shut up, they will be more inclined to do proper planning in the first place to avoid using both temps and their parasitic recruitment consultants as plasters. They will also be more inclined to take on the staff as their own employees rather than renting them at atrocious commission rates from the bimbo brigade, and they will learn, slowly but surely, that you don’t need agencies at all. “Recruitment consultants” will be so distraught at the thought of the trough being taken away from them that they’ll have to cut their weekly cocaine budgets in half.
So already we see that the legislation is a good thing all around.
Let’s look at other ways companies use temps to get around proper due diligence. There is the case of my very first job in the UK - being a “dummy PA” at what I am 99.9% certain was the front business for a money launderer, a woman who was so visibly unstable that she spent less than two hours in my presence for the whole duration of my employment. She knew she was up to something; she knew she had to make the front business look legit; and she knew that she couldn’t possibly get a permanent staffer in. So she phoned up an agency and they sent over a diligent, eager temp - me - who found herself hoovered into the front business within three hours. Had I stumbled around the wrong file or asked too many questions, she could dispose of me like so much office rubbish. As it is, I beat her to the punch.
Then there was the job that followed that - an illegal role in an NHS facility. They had a backlog because the permanent staff spent all their time standing around gossiping about everybody else’s business; but instead of cracking the whip, they sent for a temp - me - and threw me into the front lines of medical hell with no training, management, or support. Had I raised a stink in anything but my own mind, I could have been out the door without a goodbye. But I didn’t, because I had bills to pay.
Had both of these companies taken me on knowing that I was not there to massage their feet while they shimmied about and gabbed, they would have been inclined to pull their socks up and cut the nonsense. Had the agencies known that they had 12 weeks to prove themselves, rather than being as good as the benefits office, they would have been less inclined to cut corners, lie through their teeth, and willingly collaborate with white-collar criminals.
The 12 week rule will force managers to grow up, pay attention to management and processes, pay more than cynical lip service to human resources, and stop relying on the welfare safety net that agencies provide. The 12 week rule will ensure that hardworking, responsible people are no longer trapped for a decade in jobs with no rights, menial pay, and smug, contemptuous attitudes held over their heads at all times.
Britain’s workplaces are finally being dragged into the 20th century. Eventually we’ll get to the 21st: the extinction of agencies altogether.
