Does Temporary Help Work Provide a Stepping Stone to Regular Employment?

In the summer of 2008, we set out to hear from Ontario’s growing population of temporary help workers, also known as, temporary service workers. Having already conducted studies of temporary help workers in the United States, we sought to compare the working conditions of temporary workers in Ontario to those of workers south of the border. We visited temporary agencies in Toronto and conducted in-depth interviews with over a dozen temporary help workers. Their circumstances are not unlike those of their U.S. counterparts — they are not adequately rewarded for their vital on-call role in contemporary capitalism and they become “stuck” in this relatively new type of work, unable to find and secure full-time employment.

The Role of Temporary Help Agencies in Facilitating Temp-to-Perm Transitions

The Role of Temporary Help Employment in Tight Labor Markets

We examine the effects of temporary help service employment on later earnings and employment for individuals participating in three federal programs providing supportive services to those facing employment difficulties. The programs include Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, whose participants are seriously disadvantaged; a job training program with a highly heterogeneous population of participants; and employment exchange services, whose participants consist of Unemployment Insurance claimants and individuals seeking assistant in obtaining employment. We undertake our analyses for two periods: the late 1990s, a time of very strong economic growth, and shortly after 2000, a time of relative stagnation. Our results suggest that temporary help service firms may facilitate quicker access to jobs for those seeking employment assistance and impart substantial benefits as transitional employment, especially for individuals whose alternatives are severely limited. Those who do not move out of temporary help jobs, however, face substantially poorer prospects, and we observe that nonwhites are more likely than whites to remain in THS positions in the two years following program participation. Our results are robust to program and time period.

Reassessing the Wage Penalty for Temps in Germany

Recent research suggests that nonstandard employment relations may be a source of innovation for the firm. In this article, we analyze firms' strategic correlates and perceived benefits from using two types of employment in‐termediaries—consulting firms and temporary help agencies—in their core activities. Organizations with an innovation strategy are more likely to use consulting firms in their core activities, while organizations that compete on the basis of low cost are more apt to use temporary help agencies. Moreover, managers say that consulting firms are more likely than temporary help agencies to provide them with special competencies in their core activities. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Executive Overview Over the past 50 years in America, we have gone from a system of work characterized by lifetime employment at a single employer to a patchwork system characterized by low security and high volatility. A major player in our new world of work is the temporary help agency, which serves as the intermediary between workers and companies. Traditionally, temporary help agencies have been regarded, at best, as a necessary evil, and, at worst, as machines that eat up and spit out workers. In fact, the reality is far more nuanced. When job seekers' options are unemployment or degraded employment, working with the staff of an agency that has an investment in promoting its profit-making commodity—good temporary workers— gives them a distinct advantage. Agency staff help applicants and valued workers improve résumés and refine their job expectations in productive ways, and often advocate for better wages, higher-level positions, and more humane, safer working conditions for their temps. Temporary employment today is thus a double-edged sword. While, on average, agency temps receive lower wages, rarely can purchase health insurance, and have virtually no employment security, they can also be buffered from the worst aspects of new employment relations by labor market intermediaries such as temporary placement agencies.

Abstract. Cluster analysis and the classification tree technique are applied to investigate the relationship between the individual characteristics of Italian temporary help agency (THA) workers and their probability of achieving a temporary job. The application aims to show some advantages of these techniques with respect to traditional econometric tools. Sketches of the most common profiles among Italian THA workers are obtained as a result. Besides the typical THA worker pointed out by previous studies (young male workers, with a medium–high level of education, living in the Northern regions), two new profiles have been identified: the first comprising male manual workers with previous job experience, whose average age is over 30 and whose educational level is low; the second comprising young female workers with a medium–high level of education, working in the service sector or in the public sector. The results are compared with the more usual logit analysis and show their robustness.

Using prehire biographic and work history data, temporary help agency workers (N= 201) were classified as marginal or satisfactory. Marginal temps had characteristics suggesting poor work histories and willingness to accept any kind of employment. In prior jobs, they were paid less and more likely to have been laid off. They had also been temps for longer periods of time, and were more willing to work weekends and nights. The classification of temps as marginal versus satisfactory was validated using posthire data, showing that marginal temps had lower performance evaluations, and exhibited more counterproductive behaviors (e.g., late, absent, unsafe, or careless).

This paper analyses the effects of Temporary Help Agencies (THA) on occupational mobility by performing an empirical comparison of the job‐to‐job upgrading chances of agency and regular (non‐agency) workers in Spain. We estimate a switching regression model to allow for self‐selection into agency work because of, for instance, more motivated workers being more likely to search for jobs through a THA. We find evidence in favour of the existence of self‐selection in all qualification groups considered. Concerning mobility, we find that agency workers in intermediate qualification levels are less likely to experience demotions than regular workers. THA increase the probability of high‐skilled workers achieving a permanent contract in Spain.

Although public service organisations have increasingly relied on nonstandard employees, little research has investigated their work experiences and job attitudes. This paper examines the mechanism by which temporary agency workers' experience of relative deprivation affects their organisational attachment toward their client firm in the public sector. Based on data collected from temporary help agencies working with an international airport in Korea, we found that the perceived likelihood of standard employment mediated the negative relationship of relative deprivation to organisational attachment. Moreover, the indirect relationship of relative deprivation with organisational attachment via perceived likelihood of standard employment was strong and significant among those with high public service motivation but was not significant for those with low public service motivation. We discuss the implications of this study in building a better understanding of relative deprivation and nonstandard work arrangements in the public sector.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate whether labour market entry via temporary work has any (persistent) effects on labour market outcomes.Design/methodology/approachUsing unique data on several cohorts of graduates from the German apprenticeship system, the authors interpret labour market entry via temporary work agency (TWA) work as a treatment and apply propensity score matching and the control function approach to investigate corresponding effects.FindingsThe results indicate a pronounced wage gap but no significant wage disadvantage in the medium term for graduates who switch to regular employment. Nevertheless, approximately 30 per cent of the graduates do not manage to leave the temporary help sector and, as a result, suffer persistent wage penalties.Originality/valueThe numerous studies that investigate the consequences of TWA work on individual labour market performance have not considered the specific situation of young workers after graduation. The rapidly increasing percentage of TWA jobs and the above average share of young workers among temporary workers call for corresponding evidence.

Several recent books have touted the benefits of working as a temporary employee, but now Parker, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and onetime temp himself, portrays a dark side to the temporary-help industry. In spite of its title, this book is a scholarly look at what Parker calls contingent work. He identifies the major companies in the industry, profiles who become temps, and describes where temporary workers are most heavily utilized. While acknowledging advantages for some workers, he also describes negative aspects of such work: low pay, few fringe benefits and usually no health coverage, irregular hours, underutilization of skills, hazardous working conditions, circumvention of equal opportunity programs, etc. Parker also claims a major reason companies use temps is to undermine labor-organizing efforts. Because temporary workers may actually make up one-third of this nation's workforce, Parker's book will be an important addition to business and labor collections

The ‘temp’ industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the United States, though relatively little is known about the operations of its key institutional agents – the temp agencies themselves. In the paper, the restructuring of the temp industry and the role of temporary help agencies as ‘labour market intermediaries’ is critically examined. It is argued that not only is the industry growing at a rapid rate, it is also polarising, as some agencies ‘restructure down’ into the lowest-paid and most exploitative niches of the labour market – where employment instability is a daily phenomenon, while others ‘restructure up’ into increasingly long-term relationships – including ‘on-site’ management deals and ‘insourcing’ agreements – with major corporate clients. Likewise, ‘temping’ is not only becoming more commonplace, but the labour-market and workplace experiences of temporary workers are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. It is apparently in the nature of the industry that both these developments are scarcely ‘visible’, as restructuring down is often associated with ‘backstreet operators’, undocumented workers and unregulated work, while restructuring up draws agencies into increasingly seamless, reflexive and internalised relationships with corporations. The paper traces some of the labour market and organisational implications of these restructuring practices through an examination of the long-established but newly-vibrant temp industry in Chicago.

Regulating Precariousness? The Temporary Employment Relationship Under the NAFTA and the EC Treaty. Un article de la revue Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations (La mondialisation, le travail et les relations industrielles) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.