The Proliferation and Consequences of Temporary Help Work: A Cross-Border Comparison

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Role of Temporary Help Employment in Tight Labor Markets

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

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. …

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.

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.

Reassessing the Wage Penalty for Temps in Germany

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.

This article aims to provide the recent court decision on legal status and working conditions for the gig worker in European Union as well as a lesson for Indonesia through the EU’s notion on gig workers. The European Union (EU) Commission enacted in 2021 a draft Directive proposal to ensure Europe's gig (platform) workers enjoy the same labour rights as other traditional employees. This article employs doctrinal legal research with statutory and comparative approach, as well as court decision are considered as the main basis to protect gig workers. The result shows that the drafts Directive to ensure Europe’s gig workers is relied on Articles 16 and 153 (1)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU), on data protection and working conditions, respectively. It has the advantage of giving certainty about the minimum requirements and procedural obligations that Member States must apply in platform work relations. Courts of several EU MSs, including Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the UK, already ruled in favour of platform workers not qualifying as self-employed, obliging platforms to reclassify them as employees. Meanwhile, Indonesia's perspective on gig workers remains vague, and the minimal standards for gig workers are unbalanced in comparison to the EU's perspective on gig workers. This article introduces the main notions and provisions of the proposed EU platform work Directive and analyses the current conditions and legal framework of Indonesia in handling the issue of gig workers.

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.