Quotes of the Day
Willie Wingfield is working as hard as he can. He advises six Omaha, Neb., companies on their IT operations, evaluating and replacing their business applications. It's challenging, fast paced — and fleeting. Laid off in 2002, Wingfield, 49, has so far been unable to land another permanent spot and instead takes jobs through a temporary-services firm, usually for one-to-three-month projects. "I don't have a strong sense of security," he says. "As long as I can continue securing clients and billing enough to pay for myself, I'm there. But if the economy turns bad, the company may not be able to keep me on."
Temp work is no longer just about the assembly line or order entry. More and more highly skilled professionals — Wingfield has an M.B.A. and 23 years of experience — are turning to temp agencies while they struggle with a tough labor market. These accomplished workers — lawyers, accountants, engineers, biochemists — make up the fastest-growing segment of the temporary work force and account for as much as a third of the business of large temp firms. That's helped lift temp agencies, which tend to do well in a recovering economy, as companies use them to dip a toe into the hiring pool. Since April 2003, the temporary-services industry has gained 212,000 jobs, accounting for nearly one-third the total growth in payroll numbers.
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
The temp trend may be here to stay. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the staffing industry will add 1.8 million new jobs between 2002 and 2012, a 54% increase, with professional jobs growing 68%. Along with outsourcing and productivity-improving software, the rise in temporary hiring is one of the big structural shifts redefining the job market, according to a paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. By relying more on temps and contract workers in good times and bad, the report says, "all else equal, this approach yields a smaller permanent work force, more temporary workers and more permanent layoffs." The temp-services industry calls this "strategic staffing"--keeping a core group of full-timers while adding and subtracting temporary and contract workers as needed. Employees call it a new career path — or a raw deal that deprives them of job benefits and security. Either way, more workers are going to have to get used to it.
Fluent in Russian and trained as a doctor's assistant, George Borayev, 23, of Asheville, N.C., was initially thrilled with his temp job as a real-life "interpreter of maladies" for immigrants seeking medical help from the county health department. "I was excited to get this job," Borayev says. "It uses my language, and it's in the same field as my degree." He worked happily as a contract employee for almost two years until this spring, when a tax bill close to $2,000 and a $1,000 emergency root canal pushed the drawbacks of perma-temping right in his face. "Of course I'd really rather have all the benefits I hear people talking about, since I work pretty much full time here," Borayev says. "I'll keep working at this, and hopefully they might take me as a full-time employee. But I don't know if it will ever happen." The vast majority of temporary employees work close to 40 hours a week, as Borayev does. But as long as they stay under that limit, they are not considered full time and therefore not entitled to federally mandated overtime pay or health benefits available to permanent workers.
For most companies, temps represent a chance to control costs: while hourly wages are usually higher for temps, employers can save the 20% to 35% of salary they pay for permanent employees in taxes and benefits. Georgetown University expanded its internal temporary-staffing service two years ago to include such professionals as grant administrators, researchers and auditors. These nonclerical workers account for about a third of the hundreds of temporary spots Georgetown fills each year. "I think it's a result of the university's trying to make the most of its resources," says Diane Charness, manager of Georgetown's temporary service. "Part of it is economics; part of it is wanting to be flexible."
Some longer-term temps enjoy the best of both worlds: they get the same benefits as full-time employees without feeling the need to give face time or flatter the boss. Steve Israeli, 33, of Brooklyn, N.Y., has been working since July 2002 through the New York City agency TemPositions, most recently as an IT manager for a state agency. Laid off by Lucent in 2002, he says he is making more than he was at his last full-time job and, after years of waiting, got his first chance to be a manager. "This is my career, absolutely," Israeli says. James Essey, CEO of TemPositions, says that by moving his best employees to more responsible positions at different client firms, "I actually can provide these folks with career paths, much as it used to be in the old days." At many firms, IT departments have been "downsized so much that there really is not a lot of career advancement."
But as this army of high-skilled temps gathers strength, there are costs to the companies that tap their talent. Jeff Wittman, 41, of Indianapolis, Ind., is about to start his third auditing assignment in six months. "I'm having fun," he says, but he misses the relationships that can be built over time by staying with one company. That sense of detachment can run deep. "When I first went into nursing, employers felt responsibility for their employees," says Chris Springer, 41, a temp in Omaha. "But you don't see that anymore in the U.S. So now I say, 'Show me the money.'"
The big question is whether temporary staffing might further delay or dampen the long-awaited boom in permanent, full-time jobs. The overall March payroll numbers in the U.S.--308,000 jobs gained since February — were encouraging, but temporary staffing so far has shown few signs of slowing. This year the industry may even exceed its record-high average daily employment of 2.54 million in 2000, according to a report by the American Staffing Association, to be released next month. "Using these flexible staffing models in certain parts of your business — it makes too much sense not to do it," says Bill McVail, a business-services analyst with Turner Investment Partners. "Will that to some extent have an effect on the eventual bounce-back? It could." So while the next job boom may be just around the corner, it also might be temporary — in more ways than one.
- Jyoti Thottam