Working Life > Modes of Working > Temporary Work

Temporary Work or Temporary Employment

Definition, Explanation

Tips, Checklist

Definition, Explanation

A temporary worker is someone employed by one of approximately over 7,000 temporary staffing firms in Germany. They lend the temporaray worker to another company. The company who rents the worker provides the workplace and job. The temporary worker will get the wage, however, from the staffing firm, while he is performing his work in other facilities of the staffing firm's clients. Such employment is always of the fixed-term sort. Therefore it is possible for an employee to be employed in several companies within a year. When there are temporarily no orders for an employee, he remains employed by the staffing firm. In practice, this regulation is rather bypassed by dismissing and re-employing the people.

The company who rents the worker takes over the authority to issue directives as well as co-responsibility in health and safety for the employee.

The market of temporary employment has been booming for years: today there is hardly a branch left in which no industrial and mercantile temporary workers are employed. The only big exception will remain the main construction trade in which temporary employment is banned.

Regulations of temporary work are in Arbeitnehmerüberlassungsgesetz, AÜG (temporary work Act) of 1972. Since it was first enacted, there have been made several changes to it. The Hartz-reforms, for instance, eliminated the special prohibition of time-limitation, the prohibition of synchronisation, the prohibition of re-employment as well as the limitation of temporary employment at a client down to 2 years. What was added, in turn, was the so-called equal-treatment clause which provides for temporary employees to be employed only at the same conditions as are regular employees of the company employing: same wages, same working hours, same vacation times and same special payments. Only a collective agreement can abrogate this legal requirement, which is often done today, resulting in special tariff contracts with wage-dumping rates of payment.

The act was originally intended to protect employees of staffing firms from being exploited. In addtion, today, it is a useful instrument in job market politics.

By using also temporary employees, companies achieve a great flexibility regarding new recruitment of employees. A temporary employee, in turn, is flexible in reacting to his own necessities: he gets to know different companies and activities, is committed only for a limited time, and can use temporary work as a start into working life. Compared to an internship, temporary work is mostly better-paid. Unemployed are increasingly trying to achieve permanent employment after a test period as a temporary worker. When such a change of employers succeeds, the staffing firm is paid a commission for placement by the new employer which amounts to around 20 to 30 % of the new gross annual income of the employee.

Despite some uncontestably positive aspects of temporary work, also the problems going along with it should be seen. Critics warn that the creation of jobs on the temporary-work hand does in no way bolster the job losses among the regularly-employed. Partly, regular employees are replaced by templorary employees. For the temporary employees, their jobs with full-time working hours does not suffice for reasonable maintainance. Then, temporary employees require complementary unemployment benefit II payments – a matter that has been called humiliating by nearly all society organizations and has started a debate about a minimum wage.

Tips, Checklist

• When you decide to work in a temporary employment firm, you should be sure that they are a member of the Interessenverband Deutscher Zeitarbeitsfirmen (IGZ) or the Bundesverband Zeitarbeit Personal-Dienstleistungen (BZA), for there are many black sheep in the field. What the temp-work firm is necessarily required to have is a valid permission to commercially yield employees which is granted by the German labour agency. Ask to be shown that permission if you think a firm is dubious
• Conclude contracts in written only. Besides the amount of your wage, your kind of activity should be exactly defined in the contract
• Temporary employees are entitled to be written an employement certificate. Also, ask your staffing firm you work for to give you a certificate even though you are not entitled to that one legally
• If the work done requires protective clothing, then it must be provided by the employer
• When you apply with a temporary employment firm, use the same accuracy and care as you do in every application and do not send indeterminate mass-applications

Last update: 02/23/2010