Hiring of staff

Page contents:

• The Temporary Agency Work Act
• Procurement
• Obligation to negotiate
• Requests for a permanent position

The Temporary Agency Work Act

To determine whether your operations or an employee are covered by the Temporary Agency Work Act (2012:854), you must make an assessment in each individual case.

The Act applies if:

1. the temporary work agency employs workers for the purpose of supplying them to client companies and
2. the temporary work agency’s workers are to work under the control and management of the client company.

Under the Act, a public authority may be regarded as a client company.

Procurement

Before hiring temporary staff, the regulatory framework for procurement must be taken into account. Read more on the page below:

Purchasing and procurement | Staff Pages

Obligation to negotiate

Before an employer decides to have someone carry out certain work on their behalf or within their business without that person being an employee of theirs, the employer must, on their own initiative, negotiate (in accordance with Section 38 of the Employment (Co-Determination in the Workplace) Act) with the trade union to which they are bound by a collective agreement for such work.

The provision sets out certain exceptions. This applies if the work is of a very short-term and temporary nature or requires special expertise, and it does not involve the hiring of workers under the Temporary Employment Act. The obligation to negotiate under the first paragraph of Section 38 of the Employment (Co-Determination in the Workplace) Act also does not apply if the proposed measure essentially corresponds to a measure that has been accepted by the trade union. However, if the trade union so requests in a specific case, the employer is obliged to negotiate before taking or implementing a decision.

For more information on negotiation: 

MBL Negotiations | HR Pages

Request for a permanent position

Under Section 12a(1) of the Act on the Hiring Out of Workers, the client company (Lund University) must offer a temporary worker a permanent position when the worker has been placed with the client company at the same operational unit for a total of more than 24 months within a 36-month period.

The placement need not have been continuous but may have been divided into several periods within the reference period. The worker may have been supplied by several different employers to the client company.

However, the placement must have been with the same client company and at the same operational unit. The term ‘operational unit’ has the same meaning as in Section 22 of the Employment Protection Act, which can be interpreted as an enclosed area, or an area where buildings are more or less concentrated within a defined area.

Central agreement

Within the public sector, the parties (the Swedish Agency for Government Employers and the central trade unions) have agreed on how the issue of long-term temporary agency work should be handled.

The agreement states that:

• An employer shall ask an employee who, through temporary agency work, has been placed with an employer within the state agreement area at the same operational unit for a total of more than 24 months over a period of 36 months whether the employee wishes to be employed on a permanent basis by the employer.
• The question must be put to the employee no later than one month before the employee is expected to reach the period specified in the first paragraph.
• The employee must respond to the question within 14 calendar days.
• In the event that the employee has expressed an interest in a permanent position, a recruitment process must be initiated as soon as possible.
• The employee shall be considered an applicant for the post.
• If the employee is deemed the most suitable candidate during the recruitment process and the employer and employee can otherwise reach an agreement, the employee shall be offered the post.

A link to the template for requesting a permanent position can be found in the right-hand column on this page.

In cases where the employee concerned has expressed an interest in a permanent position and a recruitment process is initiated, this is handled in practical terms by the organisation sending a link to the job advertisement to the employee concerned, who then applies in the usual manner. This is to ensure that merit and competence can be assessed in an equitable and objective manner for all applicants, as all applications are collated in the recruitment system.

The parties further agree that the provisions of Section 12a, second paragraph, do not apply within the sector. This means that the provision to pay compensation instead of following the procedure described above does not apply within the public sector.

When calculating the period during which the employee has been placed with the client company in accordance with Section 12a of the new wording, time prior to 1 October 2022 is disregarded. This applies to both the 24-month period and the 36-month framework period.