The temporary help field is quite unlike any other in the scope of its complexity. It is actually an industry consisting of many industries. Temporary help can be classified in any one of four categories: office, industrial, medical, and technical/professional. Under these four banner heads are numerous job titles and occupations. The temporary help industry is the only one where construction workers, chemists, X-ray technicians, and switchboard operators can all fall under the management of a single employer-a temporary help service.
What is temping?
In simplest terms, temping is working for a temporary help firm that pays you an hourly wage and all the costs associated with employment: insurance, FICA, disability, workers compensation, and fringe benefits, and so on. The temporary service sends you out on short- or long-term assignments at one of their client organizations, and the client is billed an hourly charge for your services. A temporary employee is never the employee of the organization, individual, or business where he or she is fulfilling assignment. A temporary employee is always the employee of the temporary help firm which sends the temp out.
Let’s take a look at the breakdown of personnel within the four categories of temporary help. Not surprisingly, the leader is office personnel, where you'll find 63 percent of the total annual temporary payroll. Following office is industrial/labor, with a 15.8 percent share of the population; health care, with 10.8 percent; and technical/professional, not far behind with 10.4 percent. When you consider that 10.4 percent represents almost 80,000 professional/technical temps employed in any given day, even that number becomes significant. A temporary help service is unique in structure because it is both a private-sector business and a labor intermediary. As a private-sector business, it has its own market and sells its product to a variety of customers. As a labor intermediary, a temporary help service can have considerable influence on the supply and demand of the customers it serves.
Organizations utilize temporary help to meet emergency staffing needs and to gain flexibility in staffing without incurring the costs associated with the hiring and maintenance of permanent staff?. A business could function without the services of a temporary help firm, but most find it preferable to contract out rather than take on the task themselves. Such contracting can range from a request for a one-day typist to an extensive contract for an entire shift of food and beverage workers; this type of contract may be put out for competitive bidding to a number of temporary help firms.
The good news is that because temporary help has become such a constant in business, the list of job categories filled by temps has broadened extensively. The business community is quickly learning that there are not very many categories of workers that the temporary help industry cannot provide. You'll find on the payroll of a temporary help firm everyone from an assembly-line worker to a lawyer. The nationwide shortage of qualified personnel has opened up temping to just about everyone.
