Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)

This is a technical amendment which seeks to ensure that for the purposes only of equal treatment of working and employment conditions for agency workers that are part-time employees, it is the provisions of this legislation and not that of the Protection of Employees (Part-Time Work) Act 2001 that applies. In effect, this means that whereas in that Act, the appropriate comparator that is established for an agency worker is another agency worker, that is superseded by this legislation, which takes as the appropriate comparator another directly recruited employee, subject to the criteria of section 3.