Temporary agency work — the obligation to prevent successive assignments

The Court of Justice of the EU on 14 October 2020 issued a judgement in case C-681/18, JH vs. KG, which gave the Court its first opportunity to interpret Article 5(5) of Directive 2008/104 on temporary agency work. According to the ruling that provision must be interpreted as not precluding national legislation which does not limit the number of successive assignments that the same temporary agency worker may fulfil at the same user undertaking and does not make the lawfulness of the use of temporary agency work subject to the prerequisite that it must be justified by technical, production, organisation or replacement-related reasons. On the other hand, that provision must be interpreted as precluding a Member State from taking no measures at all to preserve the temporary nature of temporary agency work and as precluding national legislation which does not lay down any measure to prevent successive assignments of the same temporary agency worker to the same user undertaking in order to circumvent the provisions of Directive 2008/104 as a whole.