Employment: 250,000 people in the temporary employment sector
While the main Tunisian union calls for an end to this practice, major companies in the sector advocate for a clear legal framework and a structuring of the profession. For the benefit of businesses and employees.
Companies that need extra manpower depending on the season, companies that need to recruit quickly to meet an unexpected order: temporary work is a necessary adjustment variable for the smooth running of businesses. However, in Tunisia, there is no specific legislation governing this practice. This leads to abuses, known to many employees, committed by temporary work agencies that take advantage of the legal ambiguity: non-payment of salaries and social charges, contract renewals beyond the four years allowed... This situation recently led the UGTT union to question the practice of temporary work and to unilaterally request the integration into permanent contracts of all temporary workers currently under contract.
Putting in place a clear and concerted framework
According to professional and structured temporary work agencies, the smooth running of the sector, and consequently the respect of employees' rights, mainly requires the establishment of a clear and concerted legislative framework. To advance their cause, temporary work agencies have been trying for several years to federate into a trade union: "We need to structure ourselves to show that our profession is not that of subcontractors, to put in place a framework of shared best practices," explains Jerick Develle, General Manager of Adecco Maghreb. For several years, Adecco has partnered with colleagues to carry out actions aimed at organizing the profession. For the moment, successive initiatives have failed due to lack of political will and numerous administrative obstacles.
Foreign companies could leave the country
The refusal to legalize temporary work overlooks an important component of the Tunisian economy. Its openness to foreign markets and the growing number of multinationals that have set up there, and which, for their part, have long traditions in the practice of flexibility and temporary work. Today, with the new developments in the national economy, we can no longer ignore the demands of foreign investors, without forgetting the demand from local groups.
On a completely different level, the crises that the country has gone through, social, political and economic, call on us to be more reactive in terms of quickly putting job seekers back into the salaried employment circuit. Temporary work can play an important role here: it currently involves no less than 250,000 people in Tunisia in sectors as diverse and important as hospitality, the automotive industry or banking services.
Among the companies operating in these professions, many foreign companies have long integrated the adjustment variable that is temporary work into their human resources policy: "A questioning of this ability to streamline the demand for manpower and the obligation to have 100% permanent contracts could, in the long term, cause them to flee," estimates a temporary work professional. This threat is all the more worrying since most of them use temporary work to train and select employees whom they will then integrate into their company with a permanent contract. In the end, it is the entire chain - temporary workers and companies - that would have everything to lose from the disappearance of a practice useful for the smooth running of the economy.
Published on February 23, 2011
Posted online on February 28, 2011
