The Good Temp

Vicki Smith, Esther B. Neuwirth

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780801458071
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

Temporary agencies place approximately two and a half million people in jobs each day in the United States. Every year, about twelve million people use these placement agencies to find temporary work. Many Americans, even those who desire permanent jobs, decide to enter the labor market through the portal of temporary agencies. Compared with the post-World War II era, when it was a marginal labor practice, temporary employment is today an entrenched feature of jobs and labor markets. How have temporary employment relationships become so widespread and normalized?

In The Good Temp, Vicki Smith and Esther B. Neuwirth provide some novel answers to this question. Their provocative analysis is based on an insider's view of the interior dynamics of a temporary help agency in Silicon Valley. It incorporates a historical perspective on the rise of the temporary help service industry. Smith and Neuwirth document how this powerful industry not only created a new market for temporary labor but also played a fundamental role in the erosion of the permanent employment model. They analyze how agencies themselves came to manufacture and market this reinvented product-the good temp, an employee who is effective and efficient, committed, and sometimes preferable to a permanent staff member.

Joining extensive participant observation data with historical analysis, The Good Temp contains some surprising findings about temporary employment today and fills a significant gap in our understanding of this important labor relationship.

Chapter One

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 developments in labor market institutions and behaviors. Specifically, we look 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 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.

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). Never theless, 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 employment. The Good Temp goes beyond general or aggregate accounts of the THS industry to show how agency staff create and sustain an employment relationship that is fraught with insecurity, ambivalence, turmoil, and anxiety, in their office and on the multiple sites of hiring companies.

Fourth, combining historical analysis of industry and personnel management rhetoric with the fine-grained picture of contemporary agency practices allows us to represent the social construction and institutionalization of a labor market for temporary labor across time. As economic sociologists have noted, markets, including labor markets, are not primordial strata on top of which layers of social organization are mechanically deposited. Instead, they are built up from complex social organization and by interactions between people and organizations (Block 1990; Fligstein 1990; Krippner 2001). Labor markets, in particular, emerge when corporate managers and personnel experts circulate new ideas about how they can employ workers; reconfigure traditional forms of employment; and identify new populations of people as suitable for particular jobs and employment relationships. The rise of temporary employment is an ideal case for a “deeply historical” study of the process of making labor and labor markets in the United States (Peck 1996; Tilly and Tilly 1994). We show how what appear to be purely “market-mediated” employment relationships are constructed by those who possess industry power and in the negotiations and contestations between personnel from labor market intermediaries, line and human resource managers, and workers themselves.

This study of the THS industry’s market-making activities is important because when the industry encouraged a new set of employment relationships and work conditions, it also encouraged the normative and structural erosion of good, permanent jobs. As temporariness in employment became more pervasive, expectations for permanent, attached employment simultaneously declined. Across the middle part of the twentieth century, corporate managers in many large, bureaucratic, and profitable companies endeavored to build internal employment systems that would provide incentives to employees to work hard and remain loyal to their employers. The THS industry directly challenged this traditional orientation just as global economic conditions were opening up opportunities for new employment practices to take hold. In much mid-twentieth-century rhetoric, experts applauded temporary employment and disparaged permanent or regular workers. In so doing, the THS industry played a critical role in undermining the stable, permanent employment contract. In the early twenty-first century, temporary workers and temporary jobs have, improbably, become a permanent feature of our employment landscape, as have insecurity and destabilization for workers in so-called permanent jobs.

There are several kinds of employment situations involving temporary workers in the United States today (besides those employed by agencies) which don’t make their way into this book.1 For example, our findings would not necessarily pertain to the practices of outsourcing firms that hire “contract company employees” and place them inside other firms on a time-delimited basis (such as Sodexho does with food service and facilities management workers, Pinkerton with security and emergency services workers, or Xerox with document production and mailroom staffing workers). Nor would they necessarily hold for the situations of companies that hire temps directly, bypassing temporary placement agencies, agencies that recruit and place well-paid, high-level contract workers, or agencies that place day laborers only. Further, the conditions and practices we analyze don’t map conveniently onto the employment experiences of seasonal agricultural workers; adjunct academic lecturers (including “freeway fliers” who teach one course on one campus and two courses on another campus every semester); or informal-sector workers who earn wages off the books (such as child-care providers, housecleaners, or day laborers in construction and landscaping), who are poorly paid and work on intensely insecure and unpredictable terms.

Our research findings concern the practices of established privatesector temporary agencies that place workers across a spectrum of entry-level, often low-skill positions.2 Job seekers can find these agencies listed in the yellow pages of the phone book, Help Wanted ads in the classified sections of newspapers, or on Internet Web sites. The agency issues a paycheck to the temp, pays state and federal taxes, and contributes to worker compensation insurance and unemployment funds. In-depth research on such agencies is vital, and for that reason we focus on agency practices rather than on the experiences of temporary workers, about whom substantial research already exists. It is important to note, however, that the percentage of all workers employed by this kind of temporary help agency was 2.3 percent in April 2006, statistically small but socially, culturally, and economically meaningful (Mishel, Bernstein, and Allegretto 2007, 239, fig. 4T).3

Although there is absolutely no doubt that most of these temporary jobs are disadvantageous compared with permanent jobs,4 we agree with others that THS agencies can improve the situation of their temporary workers. We further concur that many workers benefit from access to temporary jobs, depending on and relative to their other labor market options. (On both these points, see chapter 6.) Yet allowing for these points does not require us to sacrifice the goal of striving for better employment for American workers. It forges a middle path between seeing temporary employment as exclusively negative (the oppressive model) or exclusively liberating (the free agent model) and points to the political value of pressuring agencies to embrace a higher road of employment practices than is typically expected of them. It is no small irony that the industry that has played a critical role in increasing the precariousness of employment—an industry that is both cause and effect of the restructuring trends of the last four decades—weaves a layer of such protection by virtue of the way they manufacture their product: the good temp.

Temporary and Permanent Employment across Time

Since the 1940s there has been a paradigmatic shift in the way firms use temporary workers. In the immediate post–World War II period, temporary employment was a marginal labor market practice. A temporary worker was typically a white woman clerical worker with children, hired by a company to fill in for a permanent employee who needed time off from work—for a vacation, illness, or, more rarely, for childbearing (Moore 1965, 555, 558).5 The temp would leave when the permanent worker returned to the job. The “Kelly Girl” exemplified this temporary worker; the jobs she took were, for the most part, truly temporary, and her weak attachment to the labor force was taken for granted. Companies hired temporaries as a stopgap solution to cover short-term needs but otherwise kept permanent workforces on their payrolls that were large enough to handle the maximum workload (Henson 1996; Rogers 2000; Vosko 2000).

The permanent “good” worker of this earlier economic era was male (typically white), expected to work full time and continually; companies relied on his loyalty to the firm and, in the primary part of the labor market where he was employed, expected him to be attached, committed, and employed across his entire work career. Researchers from a variety of perspectives and proclivities have scrutinized this historically specific good worker, ranging from Whyte’s (1956) argument about the bureaucratically oriented “organization man” to Riesman’s (1965) “other directed personality,” fundamentally shaped by stable bureaucratic social relations of the firm (see also Edwards 1979, chap. 8). Contemporary feminists also weighed in on the organization man, reminding us that not everyone could attain this type of career.6 Specifically, feminist scholars pointed out, the “male career model” privileged white men’s labor force participation and excluded most white women and people of color.7

In the 1960s these conventional understandings about temporary jobs, temporary workers, permanent jobs, and good permanent workers began to shift. In a new paradigm, the notion of using a temp as individual stopgap shifted to a view of using temporary workforces as a collective labor or staffing solution (Vosko 2000). Temporary workers wouldn’t merely substitute for regular workers in permanent jobs; they would work in positions that opened up but were then eliminated on a regular basis, in accordance with fluctuations in demand for the firm’s products.

The new “staffing” paradigm of temporary employment calls for company managers to continually recalibrate the size of their workforces and employ permanently only the number of people necessary to handle a minimum work flow, rather than maintaining a larger workforce that could handle a maximum work flow; when and if it came, managers would hire groups of temps for the additional work. Here, the temporary stint is not coupled with a permanent position or worker. Both people and positions are temporary, and managers use temporary workers in a planned and systematic rather than an impromptu fashion. In addition, whereas in the postwar era the vast majority of temporary workers were women, by 2005 men were 47.2 percent of temporary agency workers (Mishel, Bernstein, and Allegretto 2007).8 Instead of Kelly Girls, the firm is now called “Kelly Services,” and the “permatemp” is now a standard term in the business and academic press and in everyday conversation. Today, temporary workers, men and women alike, work in a wide variety of occupational positions that are temporary themselves, often on an open-ended basis, which will never be classified as permanent or regular.

By the end of the twentieth century, the postwar, hegemonic model of the good worker with the stable permanent job had vaporized, both demographically, normatively, and experientially. As it turned out, the permanent job and the male career model were inextricably linked to historically specific labor markets and organizational structures. The corporate and employment restructuring of recent years has radically challenged earlier conventions about jobs and careers.9 Now, people who want permanent, full-time jobs and to work in the same companies for the long haul are more often viewed as complacent, unproductive, lacking in initiative and the capacity for innovation. The highly valued—good—workers in our economy are, in the eyes of many, the “free agents” who crave variety, diverse work environments, and the flexibility to pursue new and different careers (Reich 2000; Smith 2001a, chap. 6).10

The Good Temp adds two more chapters to this long story. The first addresses how, in mid–twentieth century, new ideas about using temporaries were articulated, circulated, and diffused, promulgated to destabilize traditional employment practices and institutions and pave the way for and normalize new ones. The second analyzes how, once the new paradigm of temporary employment was legitimated normatively, these employment relations have been built and sustained in the trenches: specifically, in temporary help placement agencies. To be sure, many researchers have discussed temporary help service agencies in the course of focusing on temporary workers. But we lack ethnographic, in-depth case study research focusing on temp agencies which would parallel, for example, targeted studies of temporary and contract workers,11 of corporate/organizational determinants of the use of temporary workers,12 or of the temporary help services industry. 13

Barley and Kunda’s (2004, chap. 4) analysis of agencies in Silicon Valley is a notable exception but they focus on agencies that serve professional and technical workers rather than agencies that place production, warehouse, assembly, and clerical temps. Agencies are the third corner of the triangular temporary employment relationship, a population of labor market intermediaries that has assumed considerable power in negotiating labor market conditions and opportunities for American workers. The Good Temp fills in the third corner of this three-way, symbiotic relationship (Rassuli 2005).

We focus on historical and contemporary processes found in the market for lower-level (i.e., low-skill, low-wage) temps, an important distinction. Many who study contingent or nonstandard employment differentiate between high-level contract workers (well-educated professional, managerial, and technical workers who possess specialized skills and often earn spectacular wages for their work) and low-level temporary workers (those who typically lack much formal education, possess general skills, earn fairly low wages, and have virtually no bargaining power) (Cohany 1998; Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson 2000, 273; Levenson 2000; Osterman 1999). Temporary employees constitute the majority of contingent workers (working in assembly, laborer, clerical, materials movers, and warehouse jobs, to name a few); comparatively fewer managerial, professional, and high-tech contractors are represented in this workforce (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2005b; Dey, Houseman, and Polivka 2007; Kilcoyne 2004, table B1).14 Thus, the dynamics, processes, and social relations discussed in this book are particular to the agencies that place the great majority of temporary workers in the United States today.

We show how, over the course of the last part of the twentieth century, the THS industry constructed a unique product: the good temp. The concept of the good temp has specific historical meaning that few have fully appreciated to date, even though cl...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. The Temporary Advantage
• 2. The Social Construction of New Markets and Products
• 3. “We’re Not Body Pushers”
• 4. Softening “Rough and Tough Managers”
• 5. Shaping and Stabilizing the Personnel Policy Environment
• 6. Do Good Enough Temporary Jobs Make Good Enough Temporary Employment?
• APPENDIX I. Analyzing the Management Media
• APPENDIX II. Frequently Asked Questions about the Economic and Legal Dimensions of Temporary Employment
• NOTES
• REFERENCES