Perils of agency work

TO understand why immigrants take a lot of the jobs in the farming and food processing industries (Mail), you have to understand the benefits trap and how these industries operate.

Both i ndustries have a small permanent staff f or year- round requirements and cover seasonal fluctuations with agency staff. These jobs are probably those being offered to hungarians via agencies.

Farming work is done through the Gangmaster system, which is like an agency.

Agencies generally get a bad press, that usually focuses on how much agency staff cost the NHS. unions loathe them, though the presence of disposable agency staff helps protect the permanent unionised jobs.

Most agency staff are at the bottom of the heap, on the minimum wage, but agency work can be a good way of getting a permanent job.

I started doing agency work in 2001. having previously been self-employed, the only benefit I could get without hassle was sickness benefit so it was agency work or nothing.

You need three recent years’ National Insurance stamps to get the dole and I didn’t have them. The agencies I signed up to were pretty good and I soon found that if you’re reliable and do a reasonable job, everyone thinks you’re marvellous and you’re rarely out of work, though i t normally involves many short-term jobs.

A typical week was two days on a food production line, two days clearing limestone chippings out of a sump and a day re-packaging tights. None of it was difficult, much of it was boring but it was all paid work; and at a good firm, you got first crack at any permanent jobs. So why doesn’t everyone do it?

Margaret Thatcher created a poverty trap when she jacked up council house rents to ‘encourage’ tenants to buy their council houses in the second round of sales.

Agency work might be almost a permanent job, but if you have a lean patch, you have to keep making fresh claims for unemployment and, more importantly, housing benefit.

With the authorities’ usual inefficiency at processing claims, you can easily get into financial difficulties and become homeless. So why take the chance on agency work when the dole isn’t brilliant but is at least there?

And you can keep trying for that elusive ‘proper job’.

enter the eastern europeans. labour wanted a clientele of unemployed, British industry wanted cheap agency workers and the eastern europeans were happy because they could earn five times as much as they could in their own countries.

In practise, this pulls in workers of a much higher standard than the job warrants because even getting twice what they earned at home is still a nobrainer. It also gave less scrupulous employers the chance to worsen conditions.

Greencore, f or example — the sandwich firm based in Northampton that said this week it was having to recruit staff from hungary because of a

lack of British workers — used to have a minimum six hours’ callout for a night shift, but this was replaced by hours worked only. It had an unpleasant habit of calling in more workers than it needed and sending the surplus home.

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