Power Politics and Precariousness: The Regulation of Temporary Agency Work in the European Union

Abstract

The search for appropriate regulation of fl exible labour in the European Union has been a contested terrain for decades. When Directive 2008/104/ EC on Temporary Agency Work was fi nally adopted on 22 October 2008 after ten years of stalemate and political wrangling between member states, it was hailed in some quarters as a positive landmark in the “fl exicurity” debate 1 by offering parity with permanent workers to many temporary agency workers. For some business lobbies, the reaction was more muted. In the UK there was concern that its £26.6 billion recruitment industry would be directly affected, with calls for its implementation to be pushed back to avoid putting jobs at risk. 2This chapter examines the phenomenon of law making from a social and institutional perspective. The role of government, national social partners and lobbyists for the temporary agency work (TAW) industry is examined in the process of deregulating and reregulating the labour market in the context of European liberalisation of agency working. The regulatory process has been characterised as a process of social construction whereby key players compete for regulatory space in the attempt to colonise areas of the labour market (Peck and Theodore 1998). The process of adoption and implementation of the European Directive on Agency Workers will be used to illustrate the dynamics of policy making in a key area of the construction of fl exibility. In particular, this research focuses on a key player in this process, the UK government. At the periphery of Europe, more neoliberal economies such as the UK have resisted any attempt to disturb their highly deregulated labour markets, which have seen a massive expansion of the labour staffi ng industry. The chapter will trace the steps taken by the UK government to protect its own highly developed TAW industry by moulding the European regulatory framework to its own purposes. In this sense, this is a case study in the mechanics of the construction of a form of labour fl exibility that does little to avoid precariousness for temporary agency workers and undermines their capacity for social reproduction.