>Doug, please let me know how your article on temps fits in with your take on
>job stability. Thanks.
It's not just my take, I think it's pretty much the consensus. The exception is Steve Rose's but that's been criticized on methodological grounds. I've only read a review of the lit, not the original papers. I owe Columbia University's library about $300 in fines and so my library access has been compromised.
The LAT article claims 2.9 million temps on a typical day at the end of 1998. That's a bit lower than the 3.2 million the BLS counted. The BLS's count is 2.5% of total employment. Temps are growing faster than their share - they're responsible for 8.7% of employment growth since the employment trough of Feb 92. But what kinds of jobs are these replacing?
The article says:
> A well-developed temporary staffing industry could actually help
>blue-collar workers find greater stability, wrote Lewis M. Segal and
>Daniel G. Sullivan, economists with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
>who have studied temporary staffing trends.
> "After all, working in the temporary services industry may be better
>than the alternative of working in the rather chaotic market in which
>firms hire their own temporary workers directly," they wrote.
> And because about 57% of all blue-collar temps find permanent jobs
>within a year, Segal and Sullivan wrote, it is unlikely that the growing
>use of temporary agencies will lead to a permanent underclass.
I'm going to track down the Chicago Fed paper, but the point that temp jobs have replaced direct jobs of equal instability may be worth taking seriously. There's long been, probably always been, incredible volatility in employment.
Doug