Working Paper
The Employment Outcomes and Advancement of Temporary Workers
Most research on temporary jobs focuses either on companies' motivations for using temps or point-in-time comparisons of temp and non-temp jobs. Both types of approach seek to shed insights into the opportunities available to those who work as temps. Yet they tell us little about why growing numbers of individuals chose to enter temporary work in the tight labor market of the 1990s, nor the career outcomes of temping for these individuals. This paper offers a different perspective by providing a comprehensive look into the employment histories of a very large sample of temps in the United States for 1995-1999.
The first part of the paper presents a descriptive analysis of payroll records. As expected, most temp spells are very short. The median hours worked as a temp equate to about one month per year. Many more people temp at some point during the year than during any given week or month - about four to six times as many. Among those who temp for short periods of time, little progress occurs in terms of wage increases. However, among those who temp for at least one quarter, a significant fraction has wage increases of at lease ten percent.
The second part of the paper presents the results of a supplemental survey designed to measure other types of employment outcomes and the fit between temps' employment objectives and those outcomes. Those who became temps to find a permanent job did so at about twice the rate of those who said that they signed up for other reasons. And those with a longer-term outlook - either to keep temping or to take the time to find the right permanent job - were more likely to realize wage increases of at least ten percent. Taken together, these results suggest that positive labor market outcomes can be associated with working as a temp.
View Cart (1)
Sponsor Login
Topics
change management, Cohen Award, corporate governance, Department of Energy, HR metrics, human capital, human resource management, knowledge networks, leadership, leadership pulse, news, organization design, organization development, seminar, sustainability, talent, talent management, teams, useful research, webinar
-
Center for Effective Organizations
- University of Southern California
- 3415 S. Figueroa Street
- Davidson Conference Center 200
- Los Angeles, CA 90089–0871
-
- 213-740-9814
- 213-740-4354
- ceo@usc.edu
-
- Join Our Email List
- Site Design: USC ITS Web Services
- usc marshall school of business