The Temporary Staffing Industry: Growth Imperatives and Limits to Contingency

The temporary staffing industry (TSI) in the United States has enjoyed explosive growth since the 1970s, during which time the market for temporary labor has become increasingly complex and diverse. Rather than focus, as has typically been done, on the wider labor market effects of this sustained expansion in temporary employment, this article explores patterns and processes of industrial restructuring in the TSI itself. The analysis reveals a powerfully recursive relationship among evolving TSI business practices, the industry’s strategies for building and extending the market, and urban labor market outcomes as the sector has grown through a series of qualitatively differentiated phases of development or “modes of growth.” Moreover, the distinctive character of the TSI’s geographic rollout raises a new set of questions concerning, inter alia, the links between temping and labor market deregulation, the nature of local competition, the scope for and limits of value-adding strategies, and the emerging global structure of the temp market. This idiosyncratic industry—which has been a conspicuous beneficiary of growing economic instability—has, throughout the past three decades, restructured continuously through a period of sustained but highly uneven growth. In so doing, it has proved to be remarkably inventive in extending the market for contingent labor, but has encountered a series of (possibly structural) obstacles to further expansion in its domestic market. These obstacles, in turn, have triggered an unprecedented phase of international integration in the TSI, along with a new mode of development—global growth.