Themes
- The globalization of temporary staffing
- National varieties of temporary staffing markets
- Temporary staffing agencies as mediators of labour migration
- Profiling the UK temporary staffing market
- 1. The globalization of temporary staffing
- One key strand of our research examines the globalization of the temporary staffing industry from the late-1990s onwards. By the end of 2007, the top 20 transnational staffing agencies were all earning annual revenues of over US$150m from outside their home markets, the top six were earning over US$1bn, and the top two – Manpower of the US and Adecco from Switzerland – over US$10bn, substantial increases on the figures from only a decade ago. This growth reflects a newly extensive geography of operations for these leading agencies: from their bases in the established markets of North America and Northwest Europe, they have expanded into a wide range of so-called ‘emerging’ markets across Latin America, East Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe. This growth has profound implications for the conditions under which workers around the world labour and the ways in which national governments regulate labour markets. Our research seeks to identify, map and monitor these leading transnational agencies and to explore the growth strategies and organisational structures that have supported their ongoing globalization. It also seeks to explore the dynamic intersections of the activities of transnational agencies with the specificities of distinctive national markets (see theme 2).
- 2 National varieties of temporary staffing markets
- Inspired by, and yet critical of, approaches that seek to identify different ‘varieties of capitalism’ within the global economic system, our second strand of research endeavours to understand the persistent distinctiveness of national temporary staffing markets. We conceptualise national staffing markets as complex institutional fields not only shaped by the activities of leading agencies and direct industry regulation, but also by labour market regulation more generally, the nature of welfare state provision, union activities, and the geographical form and sectoral structure of the economy. The place of transnational agencies within this field is highly variable: while in some contexts transnational staffing agencies are driving market growth, in others they are mediating it, and in some they are largely responsive to conditions set by domestic agencies and regulators. Such a perspective enables us to reveal important differences between what on face value appear to be highly similar markets (e.g. neoliberal contexts such as the US and Australia). Conceptually, our approach is to challenge simplistic typologies of national systems (e.g. neoliberal versus social democratic) and to develop more fine-grained and dynamic analyses of national temporary staffing market formation and differentiation.
- 3. Temporary staffing agencies as mediators of labour migration
- Our third strand of research considers the role played by temporary staffing agencies in the migration of workers. From senior managers through to blue collar manual workers, there is a long history of labour market intermediaries instigating and managing the facilitation of movement of labour migrants across national borders. Research has largely however focused on the motivations and aspirations of individual labour migrants, the demand of capitalist economies for migrant labour, or the role of social networks in facilitating migration flows.
While understanding of the causes and consequences of labour migration is often polarized between that which locates migration as an integral part of economic development and in contrast that which views low wage migration as largely exploitative what is clear is that a number of new markets have been opened up by temporary staffing agencies on the back of the movement of workers. Both executive search and headhunting firms which recruit senior managers, together with temporary staffing agencies which facilitate the migration of low wage workers, have set about expanding the market for their services, benefiting from, and potentially contributing to, the growth in international migration in the modern era.
Agencies’ facilitation of migration may range from the management of travel arrangements from the country of origin to the destination, to arranging accommodation, travel documents and employment visas and so on. In all cases, the provision of these services is for the sole purpose of placing the labour migrant in employment in the destination labour market. For instance, it has become increasingly clear that temporary staffing agencies are significant in understanding how EU-8 migrants find employment in the UK. Conceptually, our approach is that staffing agencies are active mediators of migration as well as labor market intermediaries, with considerable power to shape both the types of people who get to migrate, the conditions under which this takes place and the opportunities the workers have when they reach their intended destination.
- 4. Profiling the UK temporary staffing market
- Our fourth strand of research focuses on the emergence and growth of the UK temporary staffing industry. Theoretically, its point of departure is to focus on the agency of agencies. That is, to conceive of temporary staffing agencies as active labor market intermediaries. In the UK, we argue they have been emblematic of a wider redrawing of employment norms. Post 1940s expectations around regular working hours, career progression within a single organization, paid overtime and holidays and so on have slowly been undermined. We argue that agencies have both contributed to this systematic restructuring of the UK labor market as well as benefiting from it in terms of experiencing a growth in the markets for their business. And yet despite their presence in the UK since the late 1950s, the role of temporary staffing agencies up and down the country has tended to be ignored. This on-going research takes seriously then the place of agencies alongside other labor market institutions in shaping the kinds of labor markets experiences workers of different sorts experience in the current UK labor market.
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