Temporary agency work with foreign workers in Croatia

Agency work in Croatia is governed by articles 44 to 52 of the 2014 Labour Act (NN 93/14, as amended). A temporary employment agency entered in the register kept by the Ministry of Labour, Pension System, Family and Social Policy employs the worker and assigns him to a user firm under an assignment contract. For a third country national, the agency is the employer named on the stay and work permit.

Who employs whom

The arrangement has three parties and only two employment documents. The agency and the worker sign an employment contract for temporary work. The agency and the user firm sign an assignment contract, which is a commercial contract and creates no employment relationship between the worker and the user firm. The user firm gives instructions, assigns the workplace and answers for the working conditions the worker finds there, while the agency pays the wage, keeps the working time records and files the insurance registrations.

That split is where third country hiring usually goes wrong. The stay and work permit issued by the Ministry of the Interior is tied to a named employer, and the named employer is the agency, not the user firm. If the user firm keeps the worker after the assignment contract expires and starts paying him directly, the worker is working for an employer who does not appear on his permit. A new permit or an amendment is required, and the new employer files it. The mechanics of that change are set out in the post on changing employer within six months.

The Labour Act also sets a ceiling. One worker may be assigned to the same user firm for no more than three years, whether that is one contract or a chain of consecutive ones. A short break does not reset the count, so a user firm that keeps the same welder into a fourth year through an agency is in substance the employer, with the hiring obligations that follow.

What the agency must hold before the first assignment

A temporary employment agency is not an ordinary company that places people on the side. Assignment of workers is entered as the registered business activity, and the company is entered in the register of agencies kept by the Ministry of Labour, Pension System, Family and Social Policy. Without that entry the assignment contract has no legal basis, and in an inspection the user firm stands as the actual employer with every obligation attached. The employer side of the file, including the positive opinion from the Croatian Employment Service, is covered in the post on employer conditions and the HZZ opinion.

Registration comes with duties toward the assigned worker. Pay and other material conditions may not be less favourable than what the worker would receive had the user firm hired him directly for the same job. That floor comes from Article 5 of Directive 2008/104/EC on temporary agency work, which the Labour Act transposes. For a third country worker that rules out a lower base rate because the worker arrived from Nepal or the Philippines. The comparison is made against the post at the user firm, never against the origin market.

Inspection and the recurring finding

Supervision sits with the Labour Inspection Sector of the State Inspectorate. In practice the inspector asks for three documents on the same visit: the assignment contract between the agency and the user firm, the employment contract between the agency and the worker, and the stay and work permit showing the agency as employer. The finding that repeats is the gap between paper and site, meaning a worker on the user firm's site whose permit names a different legal entity, or an assignment contract that lapsed months earlier.

The second recurring finding concerns safety. Before work starts the user firm must describe the job, the risks and the training required to the agency, and on its own site it answers for the safety measures applied. Skip that step and the duty sits unfulfilled on both sides. Permit dates and the fees that follow a lapse are set out in the post on renewal deadlines and fees.

Agency work solves speed and administration, but it does not move responsibility for what happens on the floor. A user firm that checks the agency's register entry, the expiry date on every permit and the three year ceiling before signing has already cleared most of what the State Inspectorate writes up in this type of audit. Our work for destination employers is described on the employers page.