Court of Appeal: agency workers do not have right to apply for permanent jobs

To continue reading please register or login to your OHW+ account.

Agency workers do not automatically have the right to be invited to apply for a directly employed vacancy with the organisation they work for, the Court of Appeal has found.
Lord Justice Green said that legislature would have been more explicit had a right to apply for permanent positions been intended under the Agency Worker Regulations 2010 and the corresponding EU directive.
The case concerned an agency worker, Mr Kocur, who worked in Royal Mail’s Leeds mail centre. He was employed by Angard Staffing Solutions, an employment agency which provides staff exclusively to Royal Mail – its parent company.
When vacancies for permanent positions at the Leeds mail office became available, they were put up on a notice board and offered first to other permanent employees and to those in a “reserve class” of postal operatives. Agency workers were not eligible to apply for the posts. They could however apply for vacancies when they were advertised externally.
Kocur was involved in a lengthy dispute with Angard Staffing Solutions about his worker status, which culminated in the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) ruling in his favour that a group of workers he was a part of were agency workers and entitled to the same employment rights as Royal Mail employees.
In his latest case before the Court of Appeal, Kocur challenged the EAT’s ruling that Royal Mail did not have to give Kocur and other agency workers an opportunity to apply for permanent positions it was recruiting for when they were advertised internally.