A new survey of 2,500 agency workers reveals that while many are content, many others experience poor treatment, that agency workers do not know their rights and that they support a legal right to be given the same pay and conditions as the permanent staff with whom they work.

The survey commissioned by the TUC from YouGov interviewed almost 2,500 people who are either agency workers or who have done agency work in the past year. It was published in the run up to the closing date for responses to a Government consultation on whether vulnerable agency workers need more protection as part of the TUC’s campaign for a fair deal for agency staff.

Even though the sample significantly under-represents workers on the minimum wage - such as migrant workers - as they are difficult to poll, two in three (64%) agreed that the law should make it illegal for an employer to pay agency workers less than permanent staff for doing the same job.

Only one in four (28%) in the sample felt confident that they know their rights. More than half (56%) said they didn’t have the same holiday rights as permanent staff, even though one in four agency workers have had assignments in excess of six months. Nearly two thirds (61%) say that they don’t have the same sick pay rights as permanent staff.

Among complaints reported by respondents to the poll were:

“£5 per hr on an assignment they were charging the employer £17 per hr for.”

“Two days notice that the assignment was ending, leaving me two days only in order to find other work. Because of this I had a two week period of unemployment.”

“Being given a ridiculous job one summer in a frozen herb factory, min wage, 12 hour shifts with an hour in total of breaks, in sub-zero conditions - had to leave after 2 days cos I was getting ill.”

Unions do not oppose agency work. The poll confirms that temporary agency work suits many workers, with one in four of the sample (27%) saying that they prefer agency work even though they could get a permanent job and one in ten (9%) saying they do temporary work because they can’t or don’t want to work permanently.

But the poll also reveals a “dark under-belly” of agency work, where bad employers use the fewer legal rights and built-in insecurity of agency work to treat staff badly. One in four staff (26%) say the employer always uses agency staff for the job they were doing and one in seven (14%) say that they were replacing permanent staff.

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