The Good Temp

1. The Temporary Advantage: Introduction

The story of the explosion of temporary employment and the challenge to the permanent employment contract in the last half of the twentieth century has been told many times. Researchers from a variety of academic disciplines have written about it, as have activists who organize to help American workers maintain a decent standard of living and a modicum of dignity, and policy analysts who fear the degradation of the employment relationship that seems to be a foregone implication of temporary work. They have focused on different units of analysis: workers who desire permanent jobs but can’t find them, workers who have lost out as companies have downsized and restructured, businesses and their myriad reasons for using temporary workers as a solution to their profitability and competition problems , and the temporary help service industry (THS) itself. The Good Temp takes a different tack to explain these developmentsinlabormarketinstitutionsandbehaviors .Specifically,welook at how the THS industry in the United States reinvented temporary work in the second half of the twentieth century and examine how individual THS agencies continue to manufacture and market this reinvented product—the good temporary worker—today. It is a customized , historically specific make and model whose marketability Chapter One The Temporary Advantage Introduction 2 The Good Temp rested on two selling points: that temporary employment could be a viable alternative to permanent employment and that the workers on whom the system of temporary employment relations depends could be as good as permanent workers and sometimes better. The historical and social construction of “the good temp,” we show, was embedded in THS-industry profitmaking strategies and relied on the diffusion of new norms about what constituted acceptable employment practice. Now entrenched, these norms underpin our current employment relations in the United States which many, if not most, of us experience as precarious and contingent, even when we have so-called permanent jobs. The Good Temp builds on but goes beyond previous analyses in several ways. First, most researchers have implied that the THS industry has simply been in the business of producing generic temporary labor, even when their studies have inadvertently documented otherwise. We argue, in contrast, that the industry developed and continues to promote an image of a very particular brand of temporary labor wherein workers are effective and efficient, even committed . This product branding has been the competitive motor of the THS industry. The Good Temp documents the rise of a new ideology about employment, taking a historical view of industry and personnel management rhetoric about temporary workers as a productive and, surprisingly, quality commodity. Second, we add a new piece to the picture of temporary employment relations by showing how the THS industry must market itself to two customers: not only to the client firms in which they place their temps but to temp workers themselves. A straightforward way of thinking about the latter is this: When hunting for a temporary job, what leads a clerical worker to choose Office Angels over Kelly Services , a pharmaceutical worker to choose RxRelief® over The RxGuy, a paralegal to choose Legal Temps over Special Counsel, Inc., an assembler or warehouse worker to choose LaborFinders over Volt? We show how THS agencies try to increase the chances that job seekers will choose their services. Having to sell themselves and create demand for their products on two fronts leads many for-profit agencies not only to try to supply quality temporary workers to client companies but to supply decent services and jobs to temporary laborers. 3 The Temporary Advantage In telling the story of the good temp we show how temporary placement agencies today strive to insulate temps from gross mismanagement and help improve their wages and working conditions. Yet we don’t mean to suggest that temporary help agencies are in the business primarily to serve workers or help them with their long-term career goals. On this point, we agree with other researchers who have been concerned for what temporary agencies don’t do for American workers (Benner, Leete, and Pastor 2007; Rogers 2000). Nevertheless, because they need to attract and maintain workforces of good temps, agency representatives have a genuine stake in encouraging client companies to develop decent temporary jobs—though this process is not without its contradictions and rough edges. Third, looking in depth at how one agency serves its two sets of customers—companies and workers—provides a micro-level perspective that complements the global stories of the THS industry which dominate the literature on temporary...