The Good Temp

3. “We’re Not Body Pushers”: Constructing a Pool of Good Temps

For a temporary help service agency, attracting, developing, keeping , and controlling good temps is by no means automatic or straightforward . Nor is convincing people who really want permanent jobs that a temporary job is acceptable. Just as the THS industry has had to work over decades to achieve legitimacy for a new type of employment relationship, so, too, do agencies now repeatedly have to build and control their temp workforces. A number of research studies have framed the labor problem facing the industry as a one-dimensional matter of control. Gottfried (1991), Rogers (2000), and Vosko (2000), among others, have argued that agency staff use a variety of methods to control temporary workers (difficult, given that temporaries work at a great distance from the agency office), but what they have left unanalyzed is the way in which agencies have to construct good, qualified temps, to build, cultivate, and maintain marketable workforces not only at any individual temp’s work site but within the walls of the agency itself. This chapter describes daily life at Select Labor, then discusses the mechanisms by which the agency endeavored to manufacture a workforce of good temps. What sells in the world of temporary employment is not simply warm bodies; it is good workers who are Chapter Three “We’re Not Body Pushers” Constructing a Pool of Good Temps 70 The Good Temp willing to work on a temporary basis. And control of this workforce is embedded in its construction: cultivating good temps very likely will increase their consent, their cooperation, and the likelihood they’ll return to Select Labor for placement services. Moving from the lofty reaches of mid-twentieth-century personnel rhetoric to the lived experiences within early twenty-first-century agencies, we now examine how Select Labor tried to succeed in this endeavor. The Daily Context: What Market Forces Look Like on the Ground The high pitch of Silicon Valley’s economic climate—in 2000, a boom year—was audible in the Select Labor office. SL’s phones seemed to be ringing off the hook, and the branch manager and recruitment specialists (also referred to as placement specialists) were both overwhelmed and delighted by the number of job orders coming in from firms. The economy in the Silicon Valley in 2000 was “hot,” in the words of staffing industry leaders: dynamic, unpredictable, and turbulent. Even as many companies were inundating Select Labor with requests for temps, other firms were implementing hiring freezes, closing shop, or considering leaving the Silicon Valley. Unemployment was low—a little under 2 percent by December 2000 (Benner 2002, 207, fig. 7.1). Ninety-five percent of SL’s revenue came from the placement of temporary workers, payroll services, and temporary -to-permanent placements. The majority of those placements were in light industrial, administrative support, warehouse, and assembly jobs. At one point the newly formed technical recruiting division had over one hundred job orders from firms looking for personnel, a very large volume of orders for a midsized firm such as Select Labor. At times the staff had trouble keeping up with incoming orders and had to concentrate much of their energy on placing workers rather than drumming up accounts with new clients. On any given day an individual placement specialist could be found conducting an in-take interview with a new job seeker and then entering that person’s occupational history into their applicant database. Alternatively, staff 71 “We’re Not Body Pushers” members could be found on the telephone calling one of the agency’s regular temps to see whether he or she was available for a job opening . Or, staff might be “prequalifying” a temp before sending that person off to talk to a hiring manager about a specific placement.1 To meet demand, Select Labor staff occasionally relied on secondary contracting arrangements with other temporary placement agencies to fill an order for workers. For example, one day Lisa, the agency branch manager, received a call from a production manager at Built to Order (BTO), one of SL’s largest clients. Built to Order manufactured and assembled customized computers for several large, wellknown computer companies and needed sixty temporary assemblers as soon as possible. As soon as Lisa got off the phone with the BTO manager, she called the branch manager at another staffing agency, asking for help in meeting BTO’s hiring needs. Her counterpart at the other agency was “more than happy” to help Lisa fill this order. SL staff regularly called other...