Temporary Jobs Now Big Part Of Economy

A Temp Service Is America’s 2nd-Biggest Employer

July 9, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

PHOTOS.COM

It’s a great time to be a temporary or part-time employee in America. But it’s a terrible time to have a full-time job or a job that tasks you with making anything — except, maybe, burgers and tacos.

That’s one takeaway from last week’s June jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which revealed that Kelly Services, an international temporary staffing agency based in Michigan, is the Nation’s second-largest employer behind a company well known for its heavy dependence on part-time employees: Wal-Mart.

Between temp firms like Kelly and volume retail/service companies like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Kroger and Target, about 85 percent of the jobs held by Americans are either temporary assignments or low-wage, part-time positions. The Administration of President Barack Obama hailed the jobs report as a signifier of successful White House economic policy, ignoring the fact that the net gain in jobs for the month of June represented a massive shift in the American labor force from full-time jobs (which fell dramatically) to part-time work.

Writing for The Washington Examiner, Ashe Schow notes the June report isn’t a mere workforce aberration brought on by a glut of teenagers looking for summer work:

Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States. In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.

It’s a sad state of affairs for our country. While part-time and temp jobs reached highs last month, full-time jobs decreased by another 240,000. The recovery, or lack thereof, is being fueled by a shift from full-time to part-time work.

Further buttressing the mounting evidence that the Obama-led “recovery” has only accelerated a gradual U.S. trend away from actually making tangible goods (i.e., heavy manufacturing) and toward an service-oriented marketplace where the value of everything’s ephemeral, The New York Times created an infographic last year showing that service industries make up nine of the top 10 biggest American employers in the 21^st century, compared with the 1960s, when seven of the top 10 were manufacturers like GM, Ford, U.S. Steel and General Electric.

Is it any coincidence that one-third of Americans — a number greater than the entire private sector workforce population in the United States — is now on food stamps?