Temporary Agency Workers in Italy: Alternative Techniques of Classification

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.

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).

The increasing use of temporary agency work in Germany has implications for the nature of the employment relationship. The notion of a clearly defined employer-employee relationship becomes difficult to uphold in triangular relationships like in the case of temporary agency work where the agencies employees are working at the site of the client company. The blurring of the boundaries of organisations and of the employment relationship leads to ambiguities that affect Human Resource Management. Given the dominance of new institutional economic approaches in the analysis of temporary agency work, it is not surprising that the ambiguities and the effects and consequences of the use of temporary agency workers on the Human Resource Management of client companies have been underestimated and not been explored in detail. This paper wants to close that gap by adding a Human Resource Management perspective to the current debate in order to gain insight on the role of Human Resource Management in triangular relationships. By building on theoretical discussions and empirical studies the implications of the use of temporary agency workers for the Human Resource Management of client companies are analyzed with a special regard to commitment and identification with the client company. Different suggestions how to organize Human Resource Management instruments for temporary agency workers are presented to illustrate the value of a diverse Human Resource Management for different groups of the workforce. Key words: Temporary Agency Work, Employment Relationship, New Institutional Economics 1. Temporary agency work as an example of non-standard employment relations The notion of a clearly defined employment relationship becomes difficult to uphold as changes in the organization of work facilitated by technological improvements have blurred the boundaries between standard and non-standard employment relations. Consequently, non-standard employment relations such as temporary agency work have become increasingly prominent ways of organizing work in recent years (Nienhuser/Matiaske 2003: 467; Bothfeld/Kaiser 2003: 489; Jahn/Rudolph 2002: 1ff.). There are many different terms used in the literature to describe non-standard employment relations (Kalleberg 2000). For example, non-standard employment relations have been referred to as flexible staffing arrangements (Abraham 1988, Houseman 2001), market-mediated arrangements (Abraham 1990), flexible working practices (Brewster et al 1997) or more generally as atypical employment (Delsen 1995; De Grip et al 1997; Cordova 1986). However all definitions imply that non-standard employment departs from the standard work arrangement. Standard work arrangements are generally associated with full-time positions that are based on an indefinite contract and are performed at the employer's site under the employer's direction (Muckenberger 1985: 429; Bosch 1986: 165; Talos 1999: 417/418; Rogowski/Schomann 1996: 224ff). Though, global economic changes, increased competition and uncertainty among companies put greater pressure on them to push for greater profits and more flexible work arrangements, non-standard employment relations are not new. There have always been employment relations that did not fit the standard model of full-time work (Peck 1996). This is also true for temporary agency work that first emerged in the United States after the second World War (Mitlacher 2004: 9). As an example of a non-standard employment relation, temporary agency work involves the externalisation of administrative control and responsibility (Pfeffer/Baron 1988). Temporary work agencies employ workers and hire them out to a client company where they work at the client's premises and direction while the agency charges a fee for this service (Kalleberg 2000: 346). This creates a triangular relationship where a worker establishes connections with different companies (Bronstein 1991; Vosko 1997). The following section illustrates the recent development of the temporary work industry in Germany. …

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.

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.

Based on administrative data from the federal employment services in Germany, this paper applies statistical matching techniques to estimate the stepping-stone function to regular employment of temporary help work for unemployed job seekers. Our results show that workers who enter temporary help work from registered unemployment do not enjoy subsequent greater chances of employment outside temporary help work over a four-year period. Neither, however, do they suffer from future greater risks of unemployment. While our results, therefore, do not lend empirical support to a stepping-stone function of temporary help employment for the unemployed, they do neither confirm the existence of adverse effects on the future regular employment and unemployment chances of unemployed job seekers. If anything, temporary help work seems to provide an access-to-work function for the unemployed.

In Central Eastern European countries, temporary work agencies have become increasingly prominent, powerful and indispensable actors in providing labour to user companies in manufacturing. In explaining the success of the staffing sector in Hungary, we go beyond a broader production/regulatory environment that provided a fertile ground to the rise of temporary agencies and a resulting (local) labour control regime. We highlight the element of workers’ consent as a necessary condition for the rise of this sector based on atypical, triangular employment. Namely temporary agency work is a rather confusing triangular employment form, that involves a temporary employment relationship between a temporary work agency and a worker, where the worker is assigned to work for, and under the control of a third party, a user company. We ask how labour power is reproduced at the intersection of control structures (on part of two employers and the state) and consent (on part of workers as owners of labour power). From the workers’ perspective, we show that temporary work agencies and the triangular employment relationship appears with both multiple offers of temporary ‘mobility’ and individualised, obscure entrepreneurial risk taking, which eventually ‘traps’ workers’ consent to the sector, thus shaping specific forms of individualised working subjectivities and facilitating particular forms of social reproduction with short-term benefits and long-term vulnerabilities. Our analysis is based on 5 years of field research, interviews with non-local temporary agency workers, employed in six newly industrialised regions in Hungary that are dominated by large multinational user companies.

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.

Do temporary help agencies help? Employment transitions for low-skilled workers

Risk Shifts in the Gig Economy: The Normative Case for an Insurance Scheme against the Effects of Precarious Work*

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to compare newcomers’ perceptions on how employers structure the socialization process in the core and peripheral workforce and to explore the proactivity of these new hires in form of information seeking behavior.Design/methodology/approach– The data of this study were collected from a German sample with 359 contingent and permanent new hires in skilled jobs.Findings– The employment type was linked to both socialization tactics firms provided during organizational entry as well as information seeking of permanent and contingent newcomers. In addition, organizational tenure was positively linked with information seeking of both newly hired temporary agency workers and newcomers holding fixed-term contracts.Research limitations/implications– Since most of the participants worked for different employers, differences in socialization might also be caused by different organizational cultures. Future studies should compare the socialization of new permanent and new temporary workers on an inter-organizational and intra-organizational level.Practical implications– For skilled jobs firms should offer long-term assignments for temporary agency workers, as they are associated with higher proactivity. Further, firms should intensify the socialization of newcomers holding longer-term work contracts, as these employees may tend to show lower proactivity.Social implications– A structured organizational entry of skilled temporary agency workers may represent a stepping stone for permanent employment due to improved work attitudes and behaviors.Originality/value– This is the first study that examines employment characteristics as potential determinants of organizational socialization tactics. In addition, the study uses a German sample and therefore, follows recent calls for more research on organizational socialization in non-Anglo-Saxon work contexts.

Globally, the demand for temporary workers is rising across organizations and sectors, driven by benefits of lower cost and workforce flexibility. Flexibility for organizations, however, means job insecurity for the temporary worker. This study focuses on understanding how the Indian IT sector’s temporary agency workers (TAWs), that is, temporary workers recruited by staffing agencies to work with client organizations, cope with their job insecurity. Grounded theory-based analysis of 36 interviews revealed that TAWs rely on enhancing their employability as the primary strategy to combat job insecurity. In addition, to enhance employability, TAWs make proactive efforts to perform consistently and upskill continuously. TAWs also expect support, largely in the form of learning and development opportunities, from the staffing agency and client to augment employability. The findings and recommendations in this article to help TAWs improve employability hold significance for TAWs, staffing agencies as well as clients. With enhanced employability, TAWs overcome job insecurity—an impediment to job performance, which is of direct relevance to the worker and the client—and also affects the staffing agency’s long-term relationship with the client.

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.

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