Temps fill holes in surging economy
By Amy Joyce
Washington Post
In the past six months, the number of workers that Alternative Employment Specialists Inc. in Herndon, Va., has placed in temporary jobs has tripled. The agency has about 100 temps on assignment. A year ago, it was about 35 or 40.
It is a phenomenon Alternative Employment President Nancy Palazza has seen shadows of before, but never so clearly. "There is nothing we can use as a guideline," said Palazza, whose company is 7 years old.
The number of temporary workers filling seats at U.S. companies rose by 30,000 jobs in December, and by 166,000 last year over 2002.
What's going on?
Well, as the economy looks to be picking up, companies are hiring temporary workers with one eye looking back and the other looking forward. If sales are picking up, a company would rather hire a temporary worker today to ride the quarter out. If sales fall off again, it's much easier to let the temp go than to fire a full-time employee with severance.
"It's hard and expensive to fire people, and companies have learned that," said Paul Villella, president and chief executive of HireStrategy Inc. in Reston, Va., which is, among other things, a temporary placement firm. Those portions of businesses that could go up or down depending on the economy are where more temporary workers are now placed, he said.
Turning toward temps is "very logical," said Ed Jensen, partner in human performance practice at Accenture Ltd., the big consulting firm. "It's faster to get them in than to crank up the recruiting engine."
But there is another side to this onslaught of temporary workers: It's simply a more accepted practice these days. In the past, temporary workers came in to do marginal work, and they were treated as such. Today, however, they are just part of a new-new economy.
Temps aren't just the envelope stuffers of yore. HireStrategy, for instance, is in the midst of placing "very senior" software developers with a company in the District of Columbia that is on a hiring freeze. The six-month stints the developers have now might have been full-time openings a few years ago. But for now, the temps will help create the new software, then be on their way.
"We all know temps," said Jane Paradiso, head of the workforce planning group at workplace consultants Watson Wyatt & Co. in Washington. Paradiso knows of many trainers, especially those in technology, who are in high demand as temps. Rather than sit on a company's full-time payroll, they come in, train groups at a corporation, then move on.
And now that it's tax time, more accounting firms and companies are bringing in temps, Villella said. "You might have a (full-time) controller and CFO, but for folks who do payroll, accounting and the books, you see more and more of those people doing temp," Villella said. Also, there are temp jobs to do compliance work, he said. Or even more surprising to some, high-level executives are now playing the temp game. "We even have interim controllers, CFOs and COOs who are searching for permanent placement, or who are waiting for a business to evolve" to the point where it puts a chief operating officer on the full-time payroll, he said.
And more people are choosing the temporary work lifestyle, Palazza said. Not only are these workers more accepted by their co-workers and bosses, but "they can get a mortgage," she said. That wasn't the case when Palazza started in the business 20 years ago.
But there are temps, and then there are temps. In the 1990s, a court battle was waged between Microsoft Corp. and many of its temporary workers. The firm kept "freelancers" on projects for years at a time, without benefits or stock options. In court, the workers insisted on treatment equal to that of regular employees. The court agreed, saying they were actually common-law employees who deserved employee benefits.
The court battle spurred corporate legal departments to write rules for managers with regard to temp workers. Owens Corning, for example, wrote what it calls "co-employee guidelines," telling managers that temporary workers needed to be treated differently from full-time workers. That can mean temp workers may not attend holiday parties, have company business cards printed or sit in on employee recognition days.
But those precautions seem to have run smack up against the recent explosion of temps. Some companies still follow the "treat temps as temps" rules, but even managers at Owens Corning quietly ignore those "no temps at the holiday party" rules. For the most part, today's temporary workers (now often called consultants and contractors as they reach higher professional levels, said Villella) are treated like everyone else.
"These people become part of the culture, especially in the technology field, because they grew accustomed to making friends fast," Villella said.
Temping "is more accepted personally, socially and professionally," he said.
