Are there statistics available on the proportion of workers who began their current jobs as temps? My sense is that these figures would be significantly higher -- at least in my own anecdotal work experience, smaller businesses seem increasingly to use temp agencies to spare themselves the burden of recruiting admin employees on their own. And the tech industry seems to enjoy screening prospective hires for appropriately insane job commitment by taking them on as contingent workers first. (That is in fact the human resources law at amazon.com, for example -- at least for warehouse and customer service employees.)
While these kinds of experiences are of course not the same as long-term temping, they might help explain why many of us have a sense that contingent labor is much more pervasive in contemporary workplaces than these BLS numbers suggest.
So, any other stats out there? Even numbers on what proportion of the workforce has in the past x years done contingent work might be interesting, to me at least...
-- Sage Praxis makes perfect