Hiring of employees

Almost four out of ten workers on construction sites in the Oslo were hired from agencies.

Many agencies are not registered members of the NHO. This means that the rental industry's growth figures are larger than NHO statistics suggest.

Of all the hiring cases from employment agencies we have registered, 80 percent are illegal, according to the latest 2019 report.

In addition to employment agencies, the construction industry also has many subcontractors dominated by workers from Eastern Europe. Although they are ordinary companies, they have many features in common with temporary employment agencies, such as lack of pay between assignments, lack of protection against dismissal, lack of overtime pay and violation of working time regulations.

The consequences of this are deteriorating working conditions in the industry, lower recruitment for professional faculties, as well as lower productivity and quality.

The employment industry threatens the Norwegian model.

Secure, stable jobs with real job security are a prerequisite for a well-functioning organised working life and, ultimately, for the Norwegian model. Therefore, there is a relatively broad political consensus in Norway that workers should, in principle, be employed on a permanent basis. The Working Environment Act therefore allows temporary employment and employment by recruitment agencies only in certain cases.

The growing employment industry, in which the majority of workers are in fact temporary workers, undermines this principle. Over the past 20 years, the industry has become a significant supplier of cheaper, mostly foreign labor to important areas of working life. Renting often means that the employer's liability is completely abolished.

The industry is also characterized by “social dumping” and illegal and frivolous conditions. Competition based on the lowest possible level of wages contributes to this.

What is the dispute?

When the authorities allowed the commercial hiring of workers in 2000, they stressed that this should not contradict the main principle of permanent employment. A prerequisite for changing the law was that workers hired from recruitment agencies should be in addition to ordinary, permanent staff, and only in cases where there is a real need for temporary work. Trustees should have the right to negotiate, as well as the ability to veto irrational rental practices.

According to the Blaalida Committee's recommendation, which became the basis for the new regulations, it is necessary to prevent:

• «the development of a practice in which enterprises, in addition to permanent staff, have personnel who are loosely linked in various forms in order to solve current and usual tasks»

• «transforming the hiring of staff into a vast market in which a large proportion of workers do not have permanent jobs but are temporary workers»

The experience of the construction industry in recent years is the opposite. In the union movement, many people believe that there has long been a development of "a practice in which companies in addition to permanent core staff have staff that is loosely related to solving current and ordinary tasks" and that there is "a vast market in which a large part of the workers do not have a permanent job".

That is why more and more people believe that the development of the rental industry is a threat to how we have organized our professional life in Norway so far. Hence the broad support for the political strikes in November 2017, March 2018 and March 2019, as well as the demands to apply the restrictions contained in the Working Environment Act § 14-12 point 5, and to ban hiring from employment agencies in the construction industry in the Oslofjord area. Although the main demand did not come into force, we gained thanks to the tightening of the provisions of the Working Environment Act regarding access to rental from employment agencies. At the 2019 Fellesforbundet National Meeting, it was decided that Fellesforbundet would work to abolish the rental industry in its current form.