Securing Equal Pay and Hours
Even if agency workers had any of the entitlements under the Employment Rights Act 1996, there would still exist no requirement of equal pay for agency workers who do work of equal value compared to a permanent employer. An agency worker can be treated less favourably in his or her pay and conditions than someone doing exactly the same job, simply because they come through an agency. A proposed Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill sought to adjust this position, joining another ten pieces of employment discrimination law in the UK (on gender, race, disability, religion, sexuality, age, part-time work, fixed time work and trade union membership). After the Bill's second reading, the proposal was dropped and an older draft of a European Union Directive, the Temporary and Agency Workers Directive was revived, and passed by the European Parliament. This was possible for the first time in 2008 because the United Kingdom government dropped its opposition. In fact, the directive and the Bill are almost identical. It is understood that the law will be passed, but with a 12 week wait before agency workers will be eligible for equal pay and hours.
Read more about this topic: United Kingdom Agency Worker Law
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“We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“I swear ... to hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture.”
—Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)
“But there’s another knowledge that my heart destroys
As the fox in the old fable destroyed the Spartan boy’s
Because it proves that things both can and cannot be;
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company;
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That I am still their servant though all are underground.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
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—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)