Agreed, I had forgotten we were switching back to an agency temp situation.
I don’t really understand why more young men don’t go the office temp route when they’re looking for relatively unskilled work. The hours are day shifts with no weekends, the work is easy (if often boring), the conditions are usually clean and healthy, there are plenty of opportunities to develop careers - don’t most kids come out of school knowing how to type and use programs like Word and Excel now? I’d rather work in an office than a fast food joint by a margin of about a million to one.
I don’t know - I never worked in a factory, nor was I ever asked to work in a factory - can I ask if you’re male? Some offices/agencies are a little sexist.
Also, some agencies specialize in medical/dental/vet, some in offices, some in labour, etc…
I’ve posted a number of times on these boards about my experiences placing temps, which I did for 10 years, but I forget - I got my current job through temping! When we moved to RI from NY I temped and was hired perm at both my long term assignments. One was a doctor’s office with lousy, shitty, crappy pay, horrible duties and nasty people. I stayed about a year perm and then left to temp again. The other was this place. I started covering a maternity leave in the IT department’s help desk just logging calls. Being there made me privy to postings and I applied for a part time permanent job. I even temped in another department here while waiting to start my permanent job. While in that part time job, I posted for this one. I’ve been at the institution for 9 1/2 years and this job for 7. As a temp, there were certain things I was expected to do that the full-time workers didn’t have to do, like not have Summer Friday afternoons off, but it was a nice assignment and I got a foot in the door at a very desirable employer and I’m sure I never would have gotten a job here otherwise.
I’m guessing the guys who didn’t get much out of high school are the ones that are doing the M/W gigs. I can’t imagine anyone actually preferring those environments over an office (but hey…it takes all kinds, right?). My husband’s place is staffed with lots of temps and they’ve been there for years. As manufacturing environments go, it’s very nice. They pay well and the employees love it there.
Our resource pool where I worked consisted overwhelmingly of foreign-born, foreign-educated workers. Many of them were illegals riding 10 or 12 to a social security number (this was back during the Kuwaiti/Iraq conflict before illegal immigration became the front-page issue it is today). We had lots of Middle Eastern women and Mexican men and women working the shittiest jobs imaginable in the shittiest environments imaginable. Turnover was low because these employers were looking the other way so they could keep a steady workforce. You’d start work at $5.15/hr and within two years, you might be up to $5.50/hr. You never complained because you were never asked for proof of citizenship. Until the very end of my time there, anyway.
Well, I think it’s more YMMV when it comes to money. No, you’ll never get rich industrial temping, but the pay doesn’t exactly suck in my experience. And, if you can add a skill or two–say a certain kind of machine operator–you might be able to command more.
It’s true that offices are nicer environments, but those don’t suit all kinds of people. I tended to go the industrial temp route when I was between office jobs–these jobs were easy to get and easy to leave. But there were plenty of folks I worked with in factories and warehouses who simply would be fish out of water in an office. They liked the fact that there was no dress code outside of (for example) safety boots and eyewear. They liked the fact that nobody important came through, so if they felt the need to curse that @#$% machine, they could do so without offending the company higher-ups. Perhaps most importantly, they found the structure comfortable–they liked the buzzers/bells/tones that told them when to work and when to stop and when to take breaks.
As for advancement; again, it’s in the eye of the beholder. What was advancement to a lot of the factory/warehouse guys I worked with was the chance to learn new skills and then to use them at work. If those skills involved doing something the other guys couldn’t, so much the better. They wanted to become machine operators or lift truck drivers, for example. But they had little to no interest in “advancing” up any kind of ladder–generally speaking, they didn’t think much of those who did.
It does take all kinds, true. But that’s life.
I temped for 2 years or so before I found my current job. Some of the places were great (I paticularly enjoyed filing and making copies for the insurance company with the hands for a logo, as well as the filing/ telemarketing for the fast-food concern whose logo is a clown), and there were some rather crappy ones - there was the plumbing supply company with the salesmen who treated anyone other than their immediate cow orkers like dirt; I’m so glad they’ve gone out of business. Then there was the factory where the receptionist let me in at 8:02 a.m., and was training me on how to use the computer system when her boss, who I could swear on your holy book of choice was the original Dragon Lady (down to the 6" nails) fired me at 8:10 am for not arriving at 8 sharp. Oh yeah, did I forget to metion punctuality is a plus if you are a temp?
I missed the time limit on editing, so I’d like to apologize for the spelling errors. I’m usually a better speller than this.
That all makes a lot of sense, Spoons. I’m probably projecting from my own like of office environments and dislike of factory environments.
This is really a cool thread. Thanks to Arien for starting it and for everyone else for participating in it. I learned a lot. And printed the thread out to read over.
I don’t have much to share. My temping days were very limited, which is why I learned so much here. I didn’t realize there were so many ways to go about this. Thanks again everyone.
Yeah, I’m a big burly type, which is unfortunate in this case.
Around the third or fourth time I was offered a labor-dump job, I ended up just kind of shrugging and taking it because I needed the money so badly. It’s funny, because I’d gotten glowing references for this particular agency. They’d placed a bunch of friends and family in interesting office jobs - they contracted, for example, with one of the banks around here, which is what I was hoping for (and I told the placement agent so).
I’m also redeyeing it on second shift.
Unfortunately, there’s a very fine line between insisting on the sort of thing you want to do and being an unreasonably finicky person who thus doesn’t get offers. I’m not in a position to risk the latter, and so I make boxes these days.
I agree on both the money and “what people are suited for” points. I have a friend who could never be an office worker. It’s just not her style. She worked in bindery environments for the most part but would never entertain the thought of being a receptionist.
And now, a comment from The Other Side … I actually worked as a real, permanent employee for a firm that supplied temps. (Forgive me. My husband was in grad school and I couldn’t find a job in my field; yet those pesky bills still had to be paid.)
My firm wasn’t quite identical to Manpower or Kelly Girls, as we supplied “contract programmers” (as I used to say, “Kelly Girls for IT.”) We would arrange, say, six computer programmers to overhaul a company’s accounting system using new software – that sort of thing. The assignments tended to be longer (usually around 6 months) and the skills needed were very specific and sometimes esoteric.
Despite those differences, I suspect that a lot of my experience would be relevant to any kind of temp agency. So, here is what I learned:
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Most of the time it is far easier to get candidates to work temporary jobs than it is to line up companies that will use the temp firm to fill their slots. Therefore, 90% of the attention/attempts to build goodwill will be directed at the client company, NOT the temp employee.
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As a temporary employee, you are a source of revenue for the temporary agency. The more cheaply they can get you to work, the more money they will make off of your time. If you are working for $15/hour, believe me, the temp agency is charging you out at $25 or $30/hour. Unless you are an exceptional employee with particular skills and/or a client company is asking for you in particular, there is not a lot you can do about it. However, if you DO know that the temp agency really wants you, by all means, ask for more money. They will act like your wage is non-negotiable, because that’s what they want you to think. In fact, it IS negotiable, if you have anything to bargain with.
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The people who set you up with assignments are salespeople. Nothing wrong with that per se, but don’t expect them to be geniuses-- gobs of intelligence are not required for the job. The salespeople where I worked were usually good ole’ boy types with first rate people skills who had barely managed to squeak through college with a computer science degree. Since they couldn’t actually program themselves, they served as middlemen between people who needed programming services and people who were good programmers.
Have to say, Cairo, you’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know (I’ve processed my own invoices for my contracted temp services often enough to know exactly how much they’re paying for me 
). I do hate the attitudes from the pimp agencies, though, that treat temps like the lesser partner in the relationship. I know very well that they make NO money if I (generic “I as temp”) don’t work; I understand they have more temps than clients, but if the temps don’t work, no one gets paid, and no one’s work gets done. The way I see it, there is no party that is more important than the other parties in this three-way.
Absolutely! I have always been amazed at the standard “worker is the least important person” attitude.
I lucked out at my last place. I had been there for a very long time with no raise and my employer went to bat for me and got me a raise. I believe they either moved me into a higher pay category or created a new category that would better describe the work I did for them. We were one of the agency’s biggest clients and were able to negotiate. I realize that will probably never happen again in this millennium, but one of the advantages of very-long-term assignments is that after a while, your supervisors and co-workers look at you as “one of the gang.”
Um, sure…in a perfect world. But in the real world, it is all about supply and demand. And in at least some cases, there are a lot more people willing to work as temps than there are people willing to go through an agency and give them jobs as temps. So it is relatively easy for the temp agency to line up a stable of workers, not so easy to line up a stable of companies that call them regularly. That being the case, they lavish more affection on the companies than they lavish on the temps.
We used to give all kinds of promotional stuff to our companies, ranging from stupid (but expensive) crystal paperweights to airplane tickets (I kid you not). The temps? They got plastic luggage tags.
Supply and demand doesn’t have much to do with the bad attitudes of temp agencies. They act the way they do because they look down on the workers who make their money for them. I know this because I live and temp in Calgary, where there has for a long time now been more jobs than there have been temps, and the attitudes towards temps have always been crappy. It might be different in different places of course, but I’m not buying that the bad attitudes of temp agencies comes from something as honourable as supply and demand anywhere. It’s pecking order mentality, plain and simple, and temp agencies view themselves as above their workers.