Equal treatment from day one: what you owe a temporary agency worker

The commonest mistake a first-time user of agency labour makes in Lithuania is assuming the rate is the whole conversation. You agree a price per hour with the agency, the people arrive, and you treat what they are paid as the agency's business rather than yours.

It is not. A temporary agency worker on your site is entitled to the same pay and conditions as if you had hired them directly for the same job — and if the agency does not pay them, the law looks at you next.

Equal treatment, not "a fair rate"

The rule is not that agency workers should be paid reasonably. It is that they are entitled to the salary they would receive if they were employed by you directly in that role, and it applies from the start of the assignment rather than after a qualifying period.

It reaches past the hourly rate. Working time and rest periods, annual leave entitlement, and access to the collective facilities on your site — the canteen, the transport, the parking — are all to be on the same terms as your own people, unless there is an objective reason for a difference. "They are the agency's, not ours" is not an objective reason.

The principle comes from the EU's Temporary Agency Work Directive, implemented in the Lithuanian Labour Code. The practical consequence is the part worth internalising: a quoted rate that only works if the worker is paid less than your own staff for the same job is not a cheaper supplier. It is an unlawful arrangement with your name on it.

The liability that surprises people

Here is the part that turns a procurement question into a board-level one.

In Lithuania the user undertaking carries subsidiary liability for the agency worker's pay. If the agency fails to pay what is owed, the worker can claim it from you. You are not insulated by the fact that someone else signed the employment contract and someone else runs the payroll.

Read that alongside the arithmetic of a suspiciously low quote. An agency pricing below what equal treatment actually costs is either absorbing the difference — which it cannot do for long — or not paying it. In the second case the shortfall does not disappear when the agency does. It arrives at your door, along with the unpaid wages of people who worked on your site.

This is the single strongest argument for checking a supplier properly before signing, which is why we wrote how to check a Lithuanian staffing agency is actually legitimate.

What is actually yours to do

The agency is the employer and carries the employment duties. But a specific set of obligations sits with you, on your site, and cannot be contracted away.

Tell them what the job involves before they start. Working conditions, your internal rules, the risks of the work, the qualifications it requires and any medical checks. This is a briefing obligation on the user undertaking, not a courtesy.

Health and safety is shared. You control the site, so you carry the duties that come with controlling a site. An agency worker injured on your premises is not somebody else's incident.

Benchmark the role honestly. Equal treatment is measured against what a directly employed person doing that job would get. If you cannot say what that is, you cannot know whether you are complying — and "we do not employ anyone in that role directly" is a question to resolve with the agency in writing, before anyone starts.

Our article on what a temporary staffing contract actually covers sets out where the rest of the line falls between the two of you.

How this plays out in practice

Three patterns we see repeatedly.

The split-site problem. Agency workers on the same line as permanent staff, doing identical work, on visibly different terms. It is the easiest thing in the world for an inspector to see and for a workforce to resent, and it poisons retention on both sides of the divide.

The benefits gap. Pay matched carefully, then the agency workers excluded from the canteen subsidy or the shift bus because "they are not ours." That is exactly the kind of difference the rule is aimed at.

The quote that was too good. Eighteen months later the agency folds, and a group of workers presents unpaid wages to the company whose site they worked on. By then the saving has long since been spent.

The uncomfortable summary

Using agency labour does not reduce what the work costs. It changes who carries the administration, the permit risk and the recruitment effort — which is a real service, worth paying for — but the floor under the worker's pay is the same floor as for your own staff.

An agency that tells you otherwise is selling you a liability and calling it a discount.

If you want a quote built on what equal treatment actually costs for the role, tell us the role and the headcount and we will show you the arithmetic rather than a single number. Our recruitment services page sets out the engagement models and which one tends to fit which operation.