New labour regulation in Norway
The new regulation concerning hiring in personnel may have a significant impact for users of such services and could lead to cheaper contracts for hiring personnel from agencies with collective agreements.
The new regulation concerning hiring in personnel may have a significant impact for users of such services and could lead to cheaper contracts for hiring personnel from agencies with collective agreements.
Today, a temporary agency with a collective agreement will have to comply with both the salary and working conditions in this collective agreement, and with possibly higher salaries and stricter working conditions applicable in the user undertaking. The reason is that the temporary agency worker is entitled to the same salary and key working conditions as if (hypothetically) employed in the user undertaking. This current “double protection” may both lead to high costs and to a high level of “bureaucracy” for the temporary agency.
A new regulation that opens for exemptions from the provisions in the Norwegian Working Environment Act on equal treatment of wages and working conditions for personnel hired in from staffing agencies entered into force 15 July 2015. The regulation implies that equal treatment policies could be waived provided that there is a collective agreement in the staffing agency which has been concluded with a union with a minimum of 10 000 members.
However, the regulation does not have immediate effect on existing collective agreements. Only after a collective agreement is revised, or if a new agreement is concluded, will the regulation provide a basis for waiving the requirement of equal treatment. In this respect we refer to section two in the regulations. An important question is therefore what clauses the trade union will claim in the revised agreement in order to secure employee protection.
Some trade unions are critical to the implications of the new regulation. The reason is that the exemption from the principle of equal treatment means that temporary agency workers may obtain salaries and working conditions which are less favorable than the employees in the user undertaking. If workers in the user undertaking have high salaries, the temporary agency workers who are hired in, will e.g. only be entitled to the minimum salary in the collective agreement of the agency.