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.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
BroganT. (2001) Scaling New Heights: ASA's Annual Analysis of the Staffing Industry (Alexandria, VA: American Staffing Association).
2.
BurgessJ.ConnellJ. (2004) International Perspectives on Temporary Agency Work (London: Routledge).
CampbellI.BurgessJ. (2001) Casual employment in Australia and temporary employment in Europe: developing a cross-national comparison, Work, Employment & Society, 15(1), pp. 171–184.
5.
CIETT [International Confederation of Temporary Work Businesses] (2000) Orchestrating the Evolution of Private Employment Agencies towards a Stronger Society (Brussels: CIETT).
6.
ClarkeS.GaileG. (1998) The Work of Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
GilothR. (2000) Learning from the field: economic growth and workforce development in the 1990s, Economic Development Quarterly, 14(4), pp. 340–359.
12.
GonosG. (1998) The interaction between market incentives and government actions, in: BakerK.ChristensenK. (Eds) Contingent Work: American Employment Relations in Transition, pp. 170–191 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
13.
GrayA. (2002) Jobseekers and the gatekeepers: the role of the private employment agency in the placement of the unemployment, Work, Employment and Society, 16(4), pp. 655–674.
14.
JonasA. E. G.WilsonD. (Eds) (1999) The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later (New York: State University of New York Press).
15.
JonesM. (1999) New Institutional Spaces: TECs and the Remaking of Economic Governance (London: Jessica Kingsley).
16.
LaneJ.MikelsonK. S.SharkeyP.WissokerD. (2003) Pathways to work for low-income workers: the effect of work in the temporary help industry, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 22(4), pp. 581–598.
17.
LenzE. (2000) The Staffing Industry: Myth and Reality (Alexandria, VA: American Staffing Association).
MaxwellJ. A. (2005) Qualitative Research Design: an Interactive Approach, 2nd edn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).
21.
OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development] (2005) OECD Employment Outlook (Paris: OECD).
22.
PeckJ. (2001) Workfare States (New York: Guilford Press).
23.
PeckJ.TheodoreN. (2001) Exporting workfare/importing welfare-to-work: exploring the politics of Third Way policy transfer, Political Geography, 20, pp. 427–460.
24.
PeckJ.TheodoreN. (2006) Flexible recession: the temporary staffing industry and mediated work in the United States, Cambridge Journal of Economics, in press.
25.
PeckJ.TheodoreN.WardK. (2005) Constructing markets for temporary labour: employment liberalization and the internationalization of the staffing industry, Global Networks, 5, pp. 3–26.
26.
RobertsonD. B.JuddD. (1989) The Development of American Policy: the Structure of Policy Restraint (New York: Scott Foresman).
27.
SharpeR.QuintanillaC. (1997) Temporary-help firm targets urban poor as its next labor pool, Wall Street Journal, 9 July, pp. A1, A6.
28.
SrivastavaS.TheodoreN. (2005) A long jobless recovery: IT labor markets after the bursting of the high-tech bubble, Working USA, 9(1), pp. 315–326.
29.
TheodoreN.PeckJ. (1999) Welfare to work: national problems, local solutions?, Critical Social Policy, 19(4), pp. 485–510.
30.
TheodoreN.PeckJ. (2002) The temporary staffing industry: growth imperatives and limits to contingency, Economic Geography, 78(4), pp. 463–493.
US DoL [United States Department of Labor] (2003) U.S. Department of Labor and Manpower Inc. Unveil Groundbreaking Workforce Development Partnership (Washington, DC: US Department of Labor. At: http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/eta/ETA2003153.htm).
