‘Just a Temp?’

Women’s continued high rate of participation in non-standard employment, especially temporary and part-time jobs, attracts much critical concern. Many social analysts of work regard non-standard employment as heightening risks of economic insecurity, workplace exploitation and social marginalization. Labour economists regard temporary and part-time work as comprising ‘secondary’labour markets and workers in this sector as ‘secondary earners’.Many analysts consider women’s over-representation in this sector to be a consequence of women’s exclusion from primary sector employment and its expected better conditions. This article develops an interpretive analysis of a qualitative study of 45 women temporary workers in New Zealand in 2001–2002.The experiences and aspirations with respect to work of this particular sample of women currently engaged in temporary employment relations indicate some divergent trajectories from those more commonly observed. In contrast to most current depictions of women and temporary employment, the findings indicate that some women are striving to practise their own preferential employment arrangements in ways that actively challenge conventional economic assumptions of employment behaviour and traditional trajectories of women’s lives.The article proposes that these efforts may indicate alternative oppositional strategies to normative acceptance of qualitatively degraded jobs and employment relations.