ABSTRACT
The temporary staffing industry (TSI) in the United States has enjoyed phenomenal growth during the last three decades, aided in large part by a climate of deregulation that has allowed employers to expand their use of contingent workers. By the close of the 1990s, the TSI was viewed as being among the more conspicuous New Economy success stories-an industry that would enjoy fast growth during recoveries, yet was ideally positioned to weather recessions. This supposedly acyclical industry quickly became the darling of stock market analysts, in the process generating needed investment for the TSI while also bestowing on it a new-found legitimacy. The rapid growth of the TSI seemed to signal the maturation of flexible labour market strategies which were reckoned to be immune to business cycles threats and protected from rising wage pressures by virtue of their very rationale-cost-containment staffing strategies based on the provision of workers on an as-needed basis. During recoveries, employers would increase their use of temp workers as a low-cost means of expanding capacity. As the economy slowed, it was thought, employers would maintain their use of temps as a nearly risk-free, counter-cyclical staffing strategy. But as became evident during the 2001 recession, when the TSI lost more than 540,000 jobs in the slowdown, the TSI is far from recession-proof.
