New legislation around zero-hours working risks enveloping agency workers and pushing companies into promoting ‘false self-employment’, a parliamentary committee has heard.
The House of Commons Business and Trade Committee inquiry on the Employment Rights Bill was told by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) Neil Carberry chief executive that agency workers should be exempt from much of the new legislation covering zero-hours workers as agency workers had a “fundamentally different, two-sided, flexible model of engagement”.
The committee held its final session of the inquiry into Make Work Pay, earlier this week. In addition to Carberry, it heard from senior executives at companies such as Deliveroo, Frasers Group, Evri and Uniqlo, who faced questioning over allegations of unfair practices. The MPs will soon make their recommendations to parliament regarding changes to the Bill.
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Carberry said: “It feels like there is a real risk of, in an attempt to avoid evasion by direct employers, bringing one million temps into this regime [will be] driving some of the behaviour we have seen reported in the past months where some direct employers are using platform sites to engage people who are patently workers as self-employed....
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