Nationalizing temp/casual labour agencies?

on one hand i feel sorry for people who need to do temp work. it's better than nothing, although they are underpaid and obviously given minimal rights in the workplace.  The problem for me is it seems like an unnecessary middleman who skims off the top of your pay and basically takes advantage of people who are desperate for work.  It reminds me of the the movies, where a bunch of people crowd around at a construction site to get work for the day and most are turned away while they fight amongst themselves for to catch the bosses eye.

they're like the payday loan companies.  I knew a friend who got temp work at an IBM office and he was getting paid about 50% less than the regular staff who did his exact job, with the hope that if they keep you longer than a couple of months IBM would hire you and you'd get full wages.

big surprise they decided to get another temp worker instead.

I worked for temp agencies a couple of times. They match people that need some extra money with employers. People in the cities of Canada can generally get a minium wage job if they look around so the agencies are for the people at loose ends. I don't think they are particularly a problem.

The problem of unemployment is treated with hysterics. Actually you can generally get a minimum wage job except at the start of a deep recession. The churn in employment is extremely high, Statistics Canada posts hirings annually at as much as 29% of the jobs total. An unemployed person can find work if he persists because of the turn over. So actually temp agencies aren't exactly employers of last resort, they play this filler roll. In a bad economy people actually drop out of the labour force which is social shock absorber for the rest.

That's not to say unemployment isn't terrible for a family with bills to pay and a minimum wage job is not that helpful. I'm just saying temp agencies aren't really the worst employers.

I also worked as a computer programmer at skill tech agencies. There's a temp agencies association and lots it's members are skilled work. There work goes down in a recession. Young people can get an eyeful of how an industry works by working temp.

Temp agencies have completely taken over the unskilled labour jobs in industry. Now, older workers and those without education or English language skills have very limited opportunity of finding stable employment -- and god forbid they should ever require accommodation, eg for a work injury, because theyèll be out on their ear. This is a major factor in the precipitous decline in union membership in the private sector over the past 15 years.

I was pretty young then but if Ièm not mistaken, Manpower was for short-term casual employment contracts. Temp agencies -- despite the name -- now regularly employ workers for years at a time, often on the same contract.

Seventiesguy, I am not clear who you think should apply teeth to the legislation.

There is more government in our lives than ever before. It's just that they don't call it government anymore because its all privatized social infrastructure like CAS, as one example. We still pay for it, plus premiums for the "service".

Corporate taxes are lower than they have ever been and lowering them has had no impact on the health of manufacturing sector. None of that helped capital flight, whatsoever. Indeed, corporate welfare and tax cuts have encouraged capital flight. All that has happened is that public service has been downloaded onto individual tax payers, and they are feeling the pinch. Half the time this money is just shuffled off to fix up badly managed corporations, such as the auto-giants.

As I just pointed out, Manpower used to perform the function of connecting temporary workers with employers as a government service, and during that time, the Canadian economy was five time healthier than it is now. Now it is on life support, buoyed by fortunes government and union pension funds.

The free market "no tax" solution has failed. And has failed miserably. Temp agencies should be banned. A single not for profit government agency to should connect the unemployed with the labour market. The fact is that all these companies do is add cost to the labour by taking a commission on it.

Good at what? taking 30% commission on a wage? It's the 21st Century version of a pickup truck standing at the side of the road picking up migrant labour to work in the fields, except that in the latter case there is no middle man.

So what's wrong with 30%?  If they're charging too much then a competitor will charge 20% and they'll go out of business.  That's not ideological.  It's called economics. 

Anyway, I know I'm viewed as some kind of lunatic... but basic economics is not a capitalist plot.   Socialist, captitalis... all the "ists" cannot avoid the reality of production and consumers.  It's basic stuff.

Now, yes indeed I am "ANTI-BIG GOVERNMENT".  When I think about Pro Big War or Pro Big Intrusion or Pro Big Corporate Welfare or Pro Big Military or Pro Big Poverty I am repulsed.

Government is the greatest threat to livelihood.  But that's for another thread I suppose.

triciamarie wrote:

I was pretty young then but if Ièm not mistaken, Manpower was for short-term casual employment contracts. Temp agencies -- despite the name -- now regularly employ workers for years at a time, often on the same contract.

Yes, something I learned just this week, in my first encounter with the critters. I kept wondering why they wanted to find a permanent placement for me, when i really just want some spot work. Then I figured it out. One temp placement was with the federal government which would pay the agency $17-something (probably a little low, for the feds) an hour, and the agency would pay me $11.25, basically earning $6 for every hour I worked. They would be extracting almost $50 per day from my labour for a one-time placement, over a five-month contract period. I could not believe my ears.

If temp agencies are not allowed to ask for fees from temp workers they place, how is this any different? I was thinking of looking into this.

Before anyone even thinks about going after temp agencies I would first go after the people who skim from the other end - the payday loans people, who actually ARE in the usury business.

I haven't worked through temp agencies, but I have worked with people who have on jobs where I was on call. They absolutely do serve a purpose. How is a factory going to deal with unloading semiloads of fabric that arrive at irregular times? Most can't keep 10 guys on call for a job that might happen twice a month. THey arange it through a labour place.

And I have friends who prefered to work through temp agencies  because they preferred the freedom.

And as for cutting out people who skim money off of a person's labour, there isn't too much that we buy that doesn't have some value added attached to it. It's a fee for a service, and so long as it is at a fair rate, there is nothing wrong with it.

If there's a problem, regulate it., or try to set up a free service. Don't try to have the government duplicate it.

I worked IN the temp agency. I was looking for work and while applying for a job, the temp agency interviewing me offered me a job instead. I took it and was there about 4 months before I took a job in the area i was looking.

The only good thing about it was I got first jab at a new job and when the office temps came in for their checks (gorgeous young women) but I couldnt stand the place.  Did you know they take 10-20% of a jobs yearly salaray as their commission? They wanted me to stay and even other recruitment agencies (when I was being interviewed for a job for their clients) offered me work even though I though I sucked at it, getting them 2 permanent jobs and 2-4 temps jobs a month for the agency was apparently very good.

But a real slave trader like atmosphere there. Depressed the fuck out of me

6079_Smith_W wrote:

@ jas

Those that are at a truly unfair rate should be compelled by legislation to pass on a fair wage. (on the other hand, one assumes employers also pay a small premium for the convenience of the service - arranging workers on call, and taking care of payroll and CPP -  so that breakdown of $25 isn't all just "stolen wages").

Yes, perhaps for very short term, but I think anything over 2 weeks lessens the middle work that the temp agency does and the percentage extracted can be accordingly reduced. Ten to 15% would seem reasonable.

jas wrote:

Bacchus wrote:

The only good thing about it was I got first jab at a new job and when the office temps came in for their checks (gorgeous young women)

Oh, I see. 

Quote:

  Did you know they take 10-20% of a jobs yearly salaray as their commission?

What I don't understand is why anyone would take a permanent job through a temp agency, why an employer would hire someone "permanently" through such an arrangement, and why workers and employers wouldn't simply come to their own arrangement, cutting out the middle man.

Thats easy. Companies use them because they dont have a specific 'HR' dept for hiring or cannot spare the time to do interviews. Some of them are hirign technical stuff and its more useful to use the agency for the initial weeding out  giving them specific skills to look for or specific tests to use for weeding.  People apply for permanent jobs through temp agencies because generally you cannot tell its a temp agency until you go there for the interview and besides if its a job you want, then you go through them. The original company is contractually obligated NOT to go any other route once they have signed with an agency. (unless its another agency, some companies use several agencies at the same time for the same jobs)

Tempory placement in Ontario is up from $1.5 billion a year in 2000 to $4.4 billion in 2004. In Toronto you can actually see the growth. There are all these employment agencies around with big signs up "jobs". I read there are 500 agencies in Toronto alone. Basically they are now micro-businesses.

There's an association of Temp Agencies in Canada.

http://www.acsess.org/

These temp agencies charge a fee and they have management costs. The idea that the managment cost should be small is idle talk. You look at any business that you have ever worked for and there is all this support and managment overhead. It at least doubles costs of labour. Get use to it, everything costs and the arithmetic of it is sometimes daunting.

Similarily the idea that there should be zero stuctural and cyclical unemployment isn't common sense. Nothing is 100% efficient, why would the government be able to fine tune the labour force to 100% effeciency.

Economies of scale? The entire bottom of the economy is fragmented into rather too many little shops. They are all inefficient of labour, rent, capital and taxes. Economies of scale are reached in big business by "mergers and aquistions" but so far everyone overlooks the bottom is fragmentized.  

And good luck with selling that "the labour market should be 100% efficient 100% of the time".

Thoughts:

1) Workers should not be accepting assignments for which they are being grossly underpaid, certainly not for the longer term. (Imo, this actually should apply to the regular labour market as well. We aren't going to see fundamental change until people simply stop accepting the conditions being imposed.)

2) Push the agencies' profit margin back onto the employer hiring their services to make it very expensive for companies and orgs to use temp agencies.

and/or

3) Legislate a limit to what percentage can be extracted by agencies and to limit the length of term of assignments.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

Before anyone even thinks about going after temp agencies I would first go after the people who skim from the other end - the payday loans people, who actually ARE in the usury business.

I haven't worked through temp agencies, but I have worked with people who have on jobs where I was on call. They absolutely do serve a purpose. How is a factory going to deal with unloading semiloads of fabric that arrive at irregular times? Most can't keep 10 guys on call for a job that might happen twice a month. THey arange it through a labour place.

And I have friends who prefered to work through temp agencies  because they preferred the freedom.

And as for cutting out people who skim money off of a person's labour, there isn't too much that we buy that doesn't have some value added attached to it. It's a fee for a service, and so long as it is at a fair rate, there is nothing wrong with it.

If there's a problem, regulate it., or try to set up a free service. Don't try to have the government duplicate it.

Why duplicate, when you can simply eliminate it and have the government do the same job, more accountably and more efficiently? All this is way to complex. Adding regulation in order to solve the problem of private enterprise ends up increasing the size of government bureaucracy, even though you are maintaining the fiction that you are decreasing the size of government. The taxpayer has to pay for the regulators.

Better, just to have the regulators do the job based on the social objectives you intend; helping people find jobs, as opposed to making profits for the company and its owners.

This is the whole problem with privatized "social services" they don't actually decrease government size, they just appear to do so. At the same time the objective of those providing the "social service" is NOT to provide the service, but to make a profit. This factor always ends up distorting the end point product. Much better just to do this kind of thing in-house, where first and foremost the object of the people providing the service, is providing the service.

I think its pretty damn obvious after 30 years of privatization that the government is more efficient, especially when you take into account social benefits that acrue that do not even appear in discrete profit/loss accounting of company operations. The fact is that any bureaucracy creates inefficiencies in direct relation to the size of the bureaucracy, this is generally compensated for by the factors relating to having an economy of scale.

Certainly, wages are higher in the public sector for front line workers. This is often used as an example of inefficiency for some reason that I don't understand, since better distribution of wealth has net social benefits, aside from the simple company balance sheet. Indeed, the fact that upper level management in the public service is usually lower than that in the private sector means that the overall benefit of having lower paid front line staff is reduced substantially because the upper levels of private sector management are paid substantially more than their public sector counterparts. That isn't even counting profit, much of which isn't re-introduced into the local economy, even though it is suggested that profit will be used to invest further in the economy, there seems to be little evidence for this actually happening -- witness the fact that the Ontario manufacturing sector has simply not recovered after the shock of Free Trade, even though corporate taxes in Ontario are exceptionally low.

Furthermore, the government has little ability to direct reinvestment of private sector profits, whereas they do in public sector enterprise. For example, Toronto Hydro is an important revenue stream for the City of Toronto, one that contributes substantially to paying for essential public infrastructure.

Another benefit of more evenly distributed wealth, is the fact that this promotes the small business economy, since it flows more capital into basic necessities, retail, home construction and commodity distribution services.

Ultimately both the private and public model of enterprise produce inefficiencies, it is just that we find them in different places in the system.