Employee Benefits
10th December 2020
10:17 am
Forty agency workers who collect waste for Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council in the West Midlands will receive thousands of pounds in back pay after they argued they should have been paid equally to employees.
The affected staff, who were employed by council-owned employment agency Templink and engaged by Serco on the council’s outsourced refuse collection contract, claimed they had been paid at a lower rate than permanent employees.
Under the Agency Worker Regulations 2010, agency workers must be treated no less favourably than permanent staff if they complete a qualifying period of 12 weeks in a particular job. Some of the workers carrying out the Sandwell refuse work had been contracted for up to two years.