Temporary agency work: evolution, regulation and implications for performance

Precarious employment has been associated with adverse occupational health and safety (OHS) outcomes across a range of studies. Temporary agency workers are particularly vulnerable, with studies showing they experience a higher incidence of workplace injury, and a greater likelihood of more severe injuries than all other employment types. Explanations for agency workers’ higher risk of injury have, to date, been impeded by data limitations associated with researching temporary employment. This article seeks to begin filling this gap through analyzing the experience of agency workers based upon two data sources. The first is a unique qualitative and quantitative data set developed from investigated temporary agency and directly hired workers’ compensation files; the second is focus groups of agency workers conducted in the State of Victoria, Australia. Quinlan and Bohle’s (2004) Pressures, Disorganization and Regulatory Failure (PDR) model, developed to explain the greater OHS vulnerability of precarious workers, provides the framework for analyzing the data. After explaining the key concepts in the PDR Model, the article analyses the data to test for evidence of economic pressures, disorganization at the workplace, and regulatory failure impacting upon temporary agency workers’ health and safety. The analysis supports the relevance of the PDR model, and provides an understanding of additional and unique risk factors which contribute to agency workers’ higher risk of injury. Temporary agency workers experience economic pressures in common with other types of precarious workers. However, these appear more acute amongst agency workers. They also confront disorganization risks, extending to mismatched placements; lack of familiarity with host workplaces; and more complex fractured communication. These contribute to workplace risks and create barriers to improving their experience. Many of these outcomes are a result of, or contribute to regulatory failure. The analysis finds strong support for the explanatory value of the PDR model as a tool for understanding how precariousness contributes to temporary agency workers’ adverse health and safety outcomes. It also suggests the complexities of the triangular employment relationship create additional economic insecurities and disorganization problems beyond those experienced by other types of workers, which the regulatory environment has yet to address.

PurposeThis study aims to analyze the effects of the type of agency contract on the relationship between agency workers' organizational commitment and perceived organizational support.Design/methodology/approachThe authors extend a previously developed model considering organizational support and affective commitment by including also continuance commitment in the Italian employment agency industry. The authors use a probabilistic stratified sampling method on a sample of 8,283 agency workers. Data were analyzed with structural equation modelling (SEM) and multiple group analyses.FindingsThe findings confirm the positive relationship between perceived organizational support from both the agency and the client organization and agency workers' affective commitment to them. The authors also find that agency workers develop a mutually related dual commitment in response to the support they receive from both organizations.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the literature on agency workers and suggests useful managerial and policy makers interventions for both temporary work agencies and client organizations for the development of the agency industry as well as the well-being of workers.

Many temporary agency workers receive poorer pay and employment conditions than workers performing similar tasks under traditional, direct hire arrangements. This is due to a number of factors, especially the failure in practice of employment regulation developed for standard employee—employer employment arrangements to be fully applicable in such indirect employment arrangements. This paper examines agency workers’ employment rights both against the standards of the International Labour Organization’s core labour rights, and in relation to occupational health and safety performance. The analysis demonstrates how a third party, the host employer, can influence the employment conditions of agency employees, yet bear limited responsibility for whether they satisfy minimum standards. These remain duties of the agency employer. The paper identifies a need to reconsider the legal responsibility of hosts and agency employers towards agency workers. Sharing responsibilities between hosts and agency employers may improve the likelihood of closing the gap between agency and direct hire workers’ employment conditions.

Employability is one of the leading challenges of the contemporary organizational environment. While much is known about the positive effects of job crafting on employees’ employability in general, little is known about its effects when employment contacts are different. Differentiating between temporary and permanent workers, in this article we investigate how in the environment of psychological safety, these two types of employees engage in job crafting, and how job crafting is related to their perceived employability. Data were collected among two samples, consisting of temporary agency workers (N = 527), and permanent employees (N = 796). Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses indicated a different pattern of results for the two groups: for permanent employees, increasing challenging job demands was positively, and decreasing hindering job demands was negatively related to perceived employability. Moreover, psychological safety was related to all job crafting dimensions. For agency workers, only increasing structural job resources was related to employability, while psychological safety was negatively associated with crafting hindrances. These findings suggest that a climate of psychological safety is particularly effective for permanent employees in fostering job crafting and employability.

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.

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.

The UK has one of the largest1 and most sophisticated temporary agency workers’ industries in the world. The flexibility attached to this type of working has attractions to business and to some workers, not least of which is the avoidance of employee status. The industry is regulated under the Employment Agencies Act 1973 and the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 and most employers using agency labour have operated on the assumption that the agency worker was not their employee. The case law on temporary agency workers has however, since the case of Franks v Reuters in 20032 developed an approach suggesting that an agency worker may have an implied contract with the client or end-user rather than with the agency. Recent Court of Appeal judgments have developed this concept to the extent of overriding the express wishes of the parties and even ignoring...

The article examines local union approaches toward temporary agency work in Belgium and Germany. Heterogeneous plant-level use of temporary work is explained by differences in collective bargaining, together with representation structures and rights for agency workers. Specifically, within a context providing effective rights for representation, the Belgian unions responded to firms’ economic difficulties by improving the working conditions of agency workers through negotiating plant-level agreements that contributed to fostering equality between agency workers and regular workers. In contrast, agency work became instrumental in safeguarding the core workforce’s employment in the German workplaces, where the representation rights were absent. As a result, the status of agency workers remained vulnerable.

This chapter discusses job quality in terms of job security and employability in workplaces using temporary agency workers. The general picture from previous research is that temporary agency workers have lower job quality due to a more insecure position compared to workers in other types of employment relations. Most studies are done in contexts where the agency workers have temporary contracts lasting for the time of the assignment or lack the rights to pay in-between assignments. This study fills this gap and investigates job security and employability for temporary agency workers when their working conditions are equal to that of user firm employees. The aim is to elucidate and explain how job quality expressed as job security and employability is perceived in workplaces using temporary agency workers. We have selected a ‘best case’ situation involving temporary agency workers who share the same work tasks as user firm employees and who are highly integrated within the work organization. Our analysis shows no difference concerning perceived employability. However, they differ in job security. The most important explanation for temporary agency workers’ lack of job security is the lack of skill development offered by their employer, i.e. the temporary work agency.

Agency work is more prevalent in the UK than in most other European countries. Agency workers make up around 5% of the total UK workforce, compared to 2.5% in the Netherlands, just over 2% in France, and less than 0.5% in Denmark. 1 This may, in part at least, reflect the fact that the UK has not traditionally regulated the use of agency work to any great extent. The Directive on Temporary Agency Work requires the UK to offer a greater degree of protection to agency workers, but as this article will seek to demonstrate, agency workers will remain vulnerable in certain important respects even after the Directive has been implemented. 2 This article will give a brief account of the emergence of the Directive and of English law's current position on agency work, before exploring in some detail a selection of key issues arising out of the Agency Workers Regulations 2010, the UK's implementation measure. 3

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the management of agency workers in Australia and, in particular, to identify the challenges presented to HRM by agency work.Design/methodology/approachAfter briefly reviewing the data on the incidence and growth of agency work in Australia, this paper examines the role of agency work in Australia from the perspective of the industry. Then it reviews both the evidence concerning the reasons for client organisations using agency workers and the attitudes of agency workers to their work. The paper concludes by assessing the implications of these findings for both for HR managers and HRM in general.FindingsWhen the attitudes and preferences of agency workers are compared with those of direct employees it is found that agency workers are no more satisfied with their level of flexibility than direct workers and are in fact less satisfied with their job security, skill utilization and development, pay, autonomy and influence at work. Given these findings, it is argued that agency work may be incompatible with HR strategies that are based on high performance work practices.Originality/valueThis article gives helpful advice to HR managers in any organization that are in the market for agency workers.

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 article explores migrant workers’ experiences of organisational control while undertaking temporary agency work. This study is based on a ‘covert’ ethnographic study set at a temporary employment agency that short-term contracts workers to the catering and hospitality industry. The findings show how control is perceived by workers to emerge from the over-recruitment, coupled with the allocation of work through an informal ranking system. Migrant workers’ specific socio-economic circumstances and their race and gender identities informed their responses to these systems, resulting in the buy-in to discourses of enterprise. The result was actors who are complicit, if not active, participants in self and peer regulation. As such, this article contributes to the literature on enterprising-selves, control of temporary agency workers and the wider manufacturing consent literature.

Does temporary employment increase length of commuting: Longitudinal evidence from Australia and Germany

In many European countries the number of employees hired via temporary work agencies has increased considerably over the past two decades, up to around 2% of the total workforce in the European Union today. Different studies have found the demand for agency employment to precede GDP growth. This paper explores to what extent firms utilised agency work as a strategic 'buffer' to adapt to variation in labour demand in Germany over the period 2006-2014, i.e. before, during and after the crisis of 2008/2009. Drawing on microdata from a representative employer survey (IAB Establishment Panel) and statistics on regional labour markets, the analysis finds only limited evidence on a systematic firm-level buffer function of temporary agency work. Rather, in many firms hiring from agencies is possibly part of a business strategy relying on flexible recruitment. An analysis of the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) using a propensity score matching procedure suggests that particularly in regions with high unemployment, such flexibility during the crisis supported adaptation of client firms to economic change, since they were less reluctant than non-clients to hire after the crisis.