Agency Workers – stop talking start doing‏

The TUC has published its response to Government consultation on draft Regulations which supposedly implement the EU Temporary Agency Worker Directive into UK law. The TUC correctly concludes that ’the new Regulations must include more effective anti-avoidance measures to prevent unscrupulous employers and agencies avoiding the new rights by moving agency workers between jobs within the same workplace, or by rotating agency temps on short-term assignments between different employers’.
http://www.tuc.org.uk/law/tuc-17381-f0.cfm

Even though back in May 2008 the TUC made substantial concessions on the Directive (such as a 12 week exemption period) in a joint agreement with the CBI, the regulations have been kicked into the post General Election long grass and will be implemented in October 2011 at the soonest.
http://www.parliament.uk/deposits/depositedpapers/2008/DEP2008-1341.doc

With right wing Governments ruling the roost across the EU and pro-business centre right parties holding an absolute majority in the European Parliament what price the Directive being watered down or revised out of existence before October 2011 as social Europe becomes unravelled in a neo-liberal bonfire of regulations?

For more on Labour’s betrayal of agency workers read:
http://unisonactive.blogspot.com/2009/10/shameless-mandelson-backtracks-on.html