The Temporary Staffing Industry and Workforce Development: Assessing a System of Local Experiments

Abstract

Local workforce authorities in liberal market states are increasingly charged with mitigating long-term unemployment rooted in macroeconomic forces beyond their immediate control. In the US, and now elsewhere, these authorities have begun to establish partnerships with the temporary staffing industry as a means of extending their limited resources and improving job placement outcomes. Such partnerships are especially prominent in the US, where the Department of Labor has sanctioned policy experiments between local workforce authorities and the temporary staffing industry. In order to appraise these experiments, we present case-study evaluations of three diverse and highly touted employment schemes undertaken by American workforce authorities in conjunction with temporary staffing agencies. We find that under even the most favourable circumstances, the modest mechanisms of these programmes are unable to produce appreciable impacts within local labour markets.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by grants from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Notes

¹ We were unable to contact officials claiming sufficient knowledge to address their programmes on the remaining seven cases. However, no local workforce development board declined to participate in the study outright. Given the probability that non-response is likely to indicate programme failure or institutional discontinuity, the findings below likely overstate the effectiveness of these experiments.

² The six omitted cases consist of (a) a Long Beach, California One-Stop Center renting office space to a local temporary agency; (b) the Medina, Ohio One-Stop Center's renting office space to the local Manpower office; (c) the Olympia, Washington One-Stop Centers scheduling weekly employer-recruitment visits by the local Manpower agency; (d) the Broward County, Florida One-Stop Center's training workers for placement in a call centre by the local Manpower office; (e) the Philadelphia Workforce Development Corporation contracting with the vending-service firm Aramark to open a branch of its internally operated staffing services firm in a North Philadelphia One-Stop Center; and (f) a consortium of One-Stop Centers in Oregon's Willamette Valley screening workers for 14 different temporary staffing agencies in return for information on placement opportunities in hard-to access sectors of the local economy.

³ Job placements conducted outside of WIB/economic development business were free from this stipulation.