The furore over BMW's treatment of agency workers at its Mini plant in Cowley is still fresh in the mind.
The car maker has insisted it played by the rules and was 'frustrated' with the critical media coverage it received after sacking 850 agency staff. What exactly did it expect?
BMW told Personnel Today it wasn't washing its hands of the situation - while effectively washing its hands of the situation. A spokeswoman said the firm had followed the letter of the law and it was down to the recruitment agencies involved to communicate with the agency workers about their employment rights.
The irony is that this situation exploded days after the government launched a £1m publicity campaign to encourage agency workers to be aware of their rights.
Yes, agency staff are a useful source of flexible labour to employers and, yes, they should be realistic enough to know they don't have the same rights as permanent staff and can be axed with little or no notice.
But this ignores the bigger picture. How much has BMW's name been dragged through the mud over the past seven days? The car industry's reputation is at an all-time low and this is a further damaging blow to the sector.
Good employee relations should be more than just following the letter of the law. Some of the agency staff made redundant had worked at the plant for up four years - permanent employees in all but name. Any goodwill from workers BMW could have relied on when the economy recovers has now vanished and that might prove costly in the long run.
Comments (1)
Mike,
HR professionals and end clients need to understand the range of employment models that exist now that could mitigate these issues.
In this example all the Agency workers would have been on a full employment contract (with guaranteed hours) and therefore the employer would have responsibility for the employees. A service contract would then exist between Recruitment Agency and Employing organisation and end client would then have a contract between themselves and Agency.
n the mini example we have the issue of the workers being on “temp” contracts with no rights and Mini also therefore being dragged into this as the employment responsibility is not clear.
We employ hundreds on people on this model and provide full rights and stat payments. So if we had employed these Mini workers it would have been my responsibility for redundancy pay etc. We also deploy this into Unionised environments where pay rates and conditions are detailed (e.g. Blue book) on top of “normal” rights.
There is a con I guess, we could be accused of then providing better rates or benefits than a Mini employed person which in turn a Union might consider to be unfair for the “employed” members!
Cake and eat it?
Agency Workers directive will help of course but we are already doing much of what that requires.
Posted by Rob Crossland | February 20, 2009 1:31 PM
Posted on February 20, 2009 13:31