What about Benefits?
Okay, let's imagine you are currently working as a temporary employee. What is the biggest drawback? Benefits, or rather, lack of benefits and temporary services know it.
More and more temporary services are implementing benefit programs in which their employees can participate, although most services require their temps to first accumulate a certain number of hours with their company. Temp services are instituting such plans in order to attract and keep people. "There's a definite shortage of temps," one service owner told us. "A large percentage of our job orders go unfilled due to the people shortage." Temporary help firms also lose their employees to permanent jobs, especially if the company to which a temp has been assigned has an excellent benefits package. This is an ironic twist, since the higher the level of benefit costs for permanent workers, the more likely a firm is to use temporary workers in order to keep personnel costs down.
If benefits are important to you, be selective about where you work. Before you register with a temporary service, ask about their benefits for temps-don't be shy!. There are no set rules about benefits in this industry, but innovative services have implemented programs of varying scope. Almost all of the services we questioned based their benefits programs on accumulated temporary hours. When you visit, be sure to ask your prospective service these key questions:
- Are the hours that must be accumulated cumulative or consecutive? For example, one service pays you one week of vacation after you've worked for that service 1,000 hours in any twelve-month period. Another will pay for a vacation after 900 hours of temp work, but the hours must have been accumulated for working consecutive 35-hour weeks.
- Do you begin accumulating earned hours from day one, or is there a calendar starting date?
- Are health insurance benefits contributory, or are they fully paid by the service?
- Are you automatically notified of your earned vacation, or must you monitor your hours yourself?
- Can you save hours to build for a two-week vacation, or is the policy use-it-or-lose-it if you don’t cash in from year to year?
We spoke with several temp services, large and small, some national firms and some independent owners, to see how temps were faring on the benefits front. Of the twenty services we surveyed, only three did not offer some form of fringe benefits to their employees. Following is a sample of their plans. The overall benefits and their conditions are as varied as the temp services themselves. You will need to shop around to see what the services in your area offer.
Temporary services are currently worried by recently proposed health-care legislation. The Minimum Essential Health-Care Act proposed by Senator Edward Kennedy requires all employers, including temporary help firms, to provide a minimum package of health insurance benefits to all full-time employees, who are defined as people who work more than 17.5 hours per week, with no preexisting conditions attached. Under the proposed Act, employers would pick up 80 percent of premium costs, employees, 20 percent. This worries temp services, which argue that they would be forced to insure a large number of people who sometimes work for them for only a very short period of time. At the time of this writing, the legislation is still pending.
Your Rights As A Temp
As a temp, you are an employee of the temporary help firm for which you work. Like all employees, civil rights laws of both the state and federal governments exist to protect you. Some points of law of which you should be aware follow (note that these apply to all employees, not just temps).
- A temporary service may not discriminate based on race, color, sex, age, religion, or national origin. You can be asked to take a test designed to qualify you for a particular position, but a service cannot screen out a disproportionate number of members of a particular class.
- The Equal Pay Act of 1963 prohibits wage discrimination based on sex for equal work in jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and are performed under similar work conditions.
- The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 prohibits discrimination in employment against individuals between the ages of 40 and 70.
The National Association of Temporary Services
The National Association of Temporary Services (NATS) is the only national trade association for temporary employment services. Founded in 1967, it provides legal, legislative, regulatory, and industry-specific activities/information on behalf of its temporary help service members. Currently, over 600 temporary help services are members. These services operate more than 5,600 offices in the United States, and represent approximately 80 percent of the total industry sales of temporary help services.
We suggest you consider temping with a service that is a member of NATS. Member services must adhere to a code of ethics, which gives you some protection as a temporary employee. While there are very good services that may not be NATS members, we believe membership implies an interest in the industry and a concern to see that the temporary help industry grows under knowledgeable leadership.
NATS produces some excellent literature for both individuals interested in temping and organizations seeking to utilize temporary help, in order to find out more about their publications and the temp industry in general.
