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Insecure employment is creating an army of ‘disposable workers’ too scared to take sick leave and who are fired when they can no longer perform, according to the TUC.
The union body was commenting after Health and Safety Executive (HSE) research found that “temporary and permanent employees have comparable rates for both injuries and ill health”, but also discovered “temporary employees have around half the average working days lost per employee of permanent employees."
 TUC head of safety Hugh Robertson said the findings exposed an ‘absolute disgrace’, with the reason temporary workers are half as likely to take sick leave down to two damning realities.
“Firstly, these are scared to take time off work even when they are ill or injured. Secondly, employers do not renew their temporary contracts, or even just fire them, when they take time off,” he said. “This more than anything sums up what the current deregulated workplace means, especially as many of these workers are low paid, on zero-hours contracts or otherwise vulnerable.”
The union health and safety specialist concluded:
“It is an absolute disgrace that employers are able to injure workers and then just get rid of them. We really do need to tackle this new ‘disposable worker’ economy and get these workers in unions and covered by proper employment rights.”
In 2013, the US safety regular OSHA announced an enforcement crackdown on the dangerous exploitation of temporary workers. A year earlier, the state of Massachusetts implemented a groundbreaking law intended to protect temporary workers from safety and other abuses.
The HSE's report can be downloaded from the E-Library database here
Source TUC Risks
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