The employment of temporary agency workers in the UK – with or against the trade unions?

René Böheim and Martina Zweimüller

No 2009-12, Economics working papers from Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Abstract: A firm's decision to employ agency workers may be perceived as a replace- ment of directly employed workers or as way to curb union power, which trade unions would oppose. Alternatively, trade unions may encourage the (tem- porary) employment of agency workers in a firm, if they manage to bargain higher wages for their members. We estimate the relationship between hir- ing agency workers and trade union activity at the workplace, in particular, the type of collective bargaining agreements. We use British data from the Workplace Employment Relations Surveys (WERS) of 1998 and 2004. The empirical association between the employment of agency workers and union strength is weak, but positive. Furthermore, workplaces with collective bar- gaining have lower wages in the presence of agency workers, suggesting that agency workers are hired against the unions.

Keywords: temporary work agency; collective bargaining; flexibility; Workplace Employment Relations Survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 J31 J40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2009-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.jku.at/papers/2009/wp0912.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Employment of Temporary Agency Workers in the UK: With or Against the Trade Unions? (2009)
Working Paper: The employment of temporary agency workers in the UK – with or against the trade unions? (2009)
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:jku:econwp:2009_12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics working papers from Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by René Böheim ().