Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

Seanad amendment No. 8 proposes the inclusion of an entirely new section in the Bill. This amendment is particularly important given the revision of section 7 of the Bill that deals with conferring on agency workers entitlement to basic working and employment conditions. Section 7 now follows closely the wording of article 5 of the directive. As a consequence, this requires that measures are adopted at national level to ensure proper protection of agency workers in line with the anti-avoidance provisions of article 5.5 of the directive. In particular, there is a requirement to prevent the use of successive assignments of agency workers designed to circumvent and override the entitlement conferred on them.

Seanad amendment No. 8 responds to this by proposing the insertion of a new section 8 in the Bill. The intention is to ensure that agency workers on assignment with the same hirer in a series of assignments in which they are doing the same or similar type work are not reverted to the starting point on each occasion they commence a further assignment with that hirer. Rather the provisions in section 8(1) provide that the series of assignments will be treated as a single assignment which means that agency workers will properly accumulate service and other entitlements under employment law, thus the first assignment in a relevant series of assignments is treated as the objective starting point for determining the commencement of the assignment.

Section 7(1)(b) provides a safeguard to ensure that timing between assignments when the agency worker is not working on assignment with the hirer is not taken into account for the purposes of determining entitlements. Section 7(2) defines what constitutes a series of relevant assignments which is that the hirer is the same person or a person connected with the hirer as defined in section 7(3) and the agency worker is the same person in regard to the relevant assignment and works in whole or in part at the same place of work, his or her work is directed and supervised from the same place and the work done is the same or of a similar nature and undertaken in the same or similar conditions with any differences being of minor significance.

Additionally, section 7(2) provides that where there is a break between assignments that is greater than a three-month period, this breaks the sequence of the series of assignments and further assignments after that point would commence from the start. The three-month period in between assignments is borrowed from existing legislation in the employment rights area and is the case in section 2(2) of the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977.

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