Temporary Agency Work and Trade Unions in Comparative Perspective

Nadja Doerflinger and Valeria Pulignano

SAGE Open, 2015, vol. 5, issue 2, 2158244015575633

Abstract: The article examines local union approaches toward temporary agency work in Belgium and Germany. Heterogeneous plant-level use of temporary work is explained by differences in collective bargaining, together with representation structures and rights for agency workers. Specifically, within a context providing effective rights for representation, the Belgian unions responded to firms’ economic difficulties by improving the working conditions of agency workers through negotiating plant-level agreements that contributed to fostering equality between agency workers and regular workers. In contrast, agency work became instrumental in safeguarding the core workforce’s employment in the German workplaces, where the representation rights were absent. As a result, the status of agency workers remained vulnerable.

Keywords: temporary agency work; trade unions; collective bargaining; employee representation; comparative industrial relations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244015575633 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:5:y:2015:i:2:p:2158244015575633

DOI: 10.1177/2158244015575633

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().