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RENT-A-PERSON

Each job change implies a step-up of the rate at which people pass through our lives, and as the rate of turnover increases, the duration of relationships declines. This is strikingly manifest in the rise to prominence of temporary help services – the human equivalent of the rental revolution. In the United States today nearly one out of every 100 workers is at some time during the year employed by a so-called "temporary help service" which, in turn, rents him or her out to industry to fill temporary needs.

Today some 500 temporary help agencies provide industry with an estimated 750,000 short-term workers ranging from secretaries and receptionists, to defense engineers. When the Lycoming Division of Avco Corporation needed 150 design engineers for hurry-up government contracts, it obtained them from a number of rental services. Instead of taking months to recruit them, it was able to assemble a complete staff in short order. Temporary employees have been used in political campaigns to man telephones and mimeograph machines. They have been called in for emergency duty in printing plants, hospitals and factories. They have been used in public relations activities. (In Orlando, Florida, temporaries were hired to give away dollar bills at a shopping center in an attempt to win publicity for the center.) More prosaically, tens of thousands of them fill routine office-work assignments to help the regular staff of large companies through peak-load periods. And one rental company, the Arthur Treacher Service System, advertises that it will rent maids, chauffeurs, butlers, cooks, handymen, babysitters, practical nurses, plumbers, electricians and other home service people. "Like Hertz and Avis rent cars" it adds.

The rental of temporary employees for temporary needs is, like the rental of physical objects, spreading all over the industrialized world. Manpower, Incorporated, the largest of the temporary help services, opened its operation in France in 1956. Since then it has doubled in size each year, and there are now some 250 such agencies in France.

Those employed by temporary help services express a variety of reasons for preferring this type of work. Says Hoke Hargett, an electromechanical engineer, "Every job I'm on is a crash job, and when the pressure is immense, I work better." In eight years, he has served in eleven different companies, meeting and then leaving behind hundreds of coworkers. For some skilled personnel organized jobhopping actually provides more job security than is available to supposedly permanent employees in highly volatile industries. In the defense industries sudden cut-backs and layoffs are so common, that the "permanent" employee is likely to find himself thrown on the street without much warning. The temporary help engineer simply moves off to another assignment when his project is completed.

More important for most temporary help workers is the fact that they can call their own turns. They can work very much when and where they wish. And for some it is a conscious way to broaden their circle of social contacts. One young mother, forced to move to a new city when her husband was transferred, found herself lonely during the long hours when her two children were away at school. Signing up with a temporary help service, she has worked eight or nine months a year since then and, by shifting from one company to another, has made contact with a large number of people from among whom she could select a few as friends.


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