The Italian case involved an employee hired by a temporary employment agency who had been assigned to a user undertaking between 03 March 2014 and 30 November 2016 by means of several (eight) successive temporary employment contracts as well as various extensions thereof (seventeen). The worker, believing these various temporary employment contracts to be improper requested that they should not be recognized as lawful, and given the absence of any relevant national regulations that could be invoked, turned instead to Article 5.5 of EU Directive 2008/104 on temporary agency work, which states that ‘Member States shall take appropriate measures, in accordance with national law and/or practice, with a view to preventing misuse in the application of this Article and, in particular, to preventing successive assignments designed to circumvent the provisions of this Directive.’
EU: EU Member States must take measures to preserve the temporary nature of temporary agency work
While the EU Directive on temporary agency work does not require EU Member States to limit the number of successive assignments for the same temporary worker with the same user undertaking, it nevertheless obliges them to take measures to preserve the temporary nature of temporary agency work. The decision by the CJEU on 14 October in a case examining Italian legislation amounts to obliging governments to take measures aimed at avoiding successive missions being assigned to the same temporary worker for the same user company, although the decision avoided imposing any particular measure such as a specific number threshold.
Do you have information to share with us?
What you absolutely must read this week
The essential content of the week selected by the editorial team.
Most viewed articles of the month on mind HR
What readers clicked on the most last month.
What readers clicked on the most last month.