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Chapter Four Softening “Rough and Tough Managers” Creating “Good Enough” Jobs for Temps Select Labor was founded with the idea of offering employment to those seeking work of an interim nature and, at the same time, providing the business community with highly competent employees....We are glad you came to Select Labor and have been qualified to join our staff....We look forward to providing you, as a Select Labor employee, with many meaningful and profitable work assignments. Pamphlet distributed to applicants for temporary jobs at Select Labor, n.d. Temporary help service agencies have a considerable investment in producing a pool of workers who will accept the terms of temporary employment and work in a reliable, effective fashion. Precarious as their acceptance may be, it is the foundation for participation in a system of contingent employment. Chapter 3 showed how one agency’s staff worked with one group of its customers, job seekers who used the services of Select Labor to find temporary positions. It is time to turn to Select Labor’s other customers—the hiring firms—and look at how agency staff intervened at two different levels to build a market and protect their investment. Specifically, they worked to stabilize 99 Softening “Rough and Tough Managers” the corporate demand side of the temporary employment relationship both at the point of production and at the point of higher-level policymakers. This chapter focuses on the former to show how the agency staff built new employment relationships on the shop floor and in the office. As Gonos, Ofstead, and Peck have shown, and as we found in analyzing business publications, the THS industry went all out in its market-making efforts to convince employers that temporary employees could be acceptable, relatively trustworthy, and dependable workers. But scholarly studies and media accounts were silent on the issue of how a system of temporary jobs would be built, coordinated, and maintained, once hiring companies had laid out the welcome mat for temps. Not only must there be jobs for temps; there must be particular types of jobs. If temporary help placement firms hope to stabilize their product—good temporary workers—they must minimally stabilize and guarantee the quality of jobs in which they can place them. In the late twentieth century advertising decent temporary jobs was a marketing pitch: for example, while the sales literature circulated to client firms highlighted the quality of its temporary laborers, the literature for job applicants (quoted in the epigraph above) lauded the “meaningful and profitable work assignments” that awaited them if they used SL’s services. Agencies, to remain competitive, have to minimize the risks their employees will face when they report for work in diverse companies. They need to be attentive to abusive conditions or legal complications that might lead temporary workers to sue agencies and client firms.1 We suggest that, ironically, temporary employment, a precarious employment relationship, is built on efforts of agencies to eliminate risk and capriciousness on shop and office floors.2 Without such intervention, temps might refuse their consent and cooperation with their hiring managers. To be precise, agency staff broker relations between the temporary workforce and the hiring companies. They must heed the practices of the hiring companies and the ways in which those practices potentially can compromise the quality and output of temporary workers. Agency staff have to interpret hiring companies’ distinct cultures, markets, and philosophies and learn how to work with and around them. Then they must teach managers in client firms how to use 100 The Good Temp temps effectively and gain their compliance. We saw how, in the middle of the twentieth century, personnel and THS industry writers directed their pitch to managers inside hiring companies about ways to use temps efficiently and responsibly. Our field research shows that now, agencies have taken up much of the responsibility of integrating temps into hiring companies and minimizing any disruptiveness that might take place when line managers have to supervise workers who are not part of their regular workforce. If agency staff place temps at companies with bad work conditions— work sites that are unsafe or are managed by supervisors who resent the addition of temps to their units, who act “rough and tough,” as one agency staff member put it, or blatantly exploit temps—they must deal with an increasing volume of complaints and labor turnover. Given the demise of the fee-splitting arrangement and the advent of the per-hour markup as a source...

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