Friday, 14 January 2005 - 8:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Welfare Reform

Temporary Employment and Welfare-to-Work

Substantial minorities of welfare recipients do work at “temp’ jobs as they move from welfare to work, but there is disagreement over whether or not welfare agencies should encourage or discourage this. Proponents argue that temp jobs provide a “stepping stone” to regular jobs by providing the skills and connections necessary to get regular jobs, while opponents argue that temp work is instead a “revolving door” and that temp workers do not gain the skills and connections needed to move out of low paid, unstable dead-end jobs. The question we are to examine is “Do temp workers eventually move into regular jobs and do their employment outcomes improve over time at a lower rate, at the same rate, or at a higher rate than those of non-temps when we control for differences in temps’ and non-temps’ initial talents, training and barriers to work?”

We use panel data from the Women’s Employment Survey (WES), which has collected data on women’s personal characteristics, families, and work situations at four interviews conducted over a roughly four-year period for a representative sample of single mothers who received TANF from an urban Michigan county in February 1997. We compare the employment and wage trajectories of recipients who had temped to those of recipients who had worked at regular jobs and we can use fixed-effect models to test directly whether women who have temped experience less future improvement in employment outcomes than women with comparable skills, tastes, and constraints who have not temped.

Temping is an integral part of TANF recipients’ job search strategies and employment packages as they establish themselves in the labor market. Our results are consistent with the stepping stone story when we used longitudinal data to compare changes in work outcomes of temps and non-temps. Women who temp see at least the same and sometimes greater gains in employment rates, months worked, job quality, wages and benefits as do other workers. Only two negative associations of temping with work outcomes remained: employment instability and experience of discrimination.

We recommend that welfare agencies actively incorporate temporary help agencies as part of their job placement strategies. But caution is warranted. The reports of discrimination suggests that temporary help agencies may need to intervene, either to protect the workers or to better inform them about the terms of their employment contracts. The issue of employment continuity suggests a need for supportive services to help ex-recipients either to keep jobs or to find new jobs more quickly.

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