Extension of the Principle of Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value

The current Temporary Agency Workers Regulations (S.L. 452.106) regulate temporary agency workers, transposing Directive 2008/104/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on temporary agency work into Maltese law. This legislation is meant to ensure equality of treatment between temporary agency workers and employees of the user undertaking (the entity for which the temporary agency workers would be providing their services).

The present regulations make exceptions to the applicability of the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. To ensure better equality of treatment, a new legal notice 128 of 2024 entitled ‘Temporary Agency Workers Regulations, 2024’ (S.L. 452.133), has been published today and will come into force on the 1st January 2025, replacing the present regulations.

The new regulations apply to both ‘temporary work agencies’ and ‘outsourcing agencies’, the latter being a newly created legal term by the Employment Agencies Regulations (S.L. 452.130), which also came into force earlier this year. An ‘outsourcing agency’ is defined as an agency that retains supervision and control of its workers during their assignment with a user undertaking, whilst in the case of the traditional ‘temping agency’, direction and control is exercised by the user undertaking.

By virtue of the new regulations, workers of both employment agencies (i.e. temping and outsourcing) will be afforded the same basic working and employment conditions as if they had been recruited directly by the user undertaking. These conditions include inter alia, the rate of remuneration, leave entitlements, overtime and working time.

Another major change introduced by the new regulations is the removal of the exemptions to the principle of equal pay which currently exist, being:

1. A temporary agency worker employed on an indefinite basis and paid in between assignments was not entitled to equal pay comparable to that of the workers of the user undertakings;
2. A temporary agency worker who qualified for equal pay, was not entitled to such pay for the first four weeks of the assignment with the user undertaking if the assignment lasted for fourteen weeks or more.

Both exemptions will now be removed, with the principle of equal pay applying as from the first day of the assignment with the user undertaking and irrespective of whether the contract is fixed or indefinite.