The Permanent Lure of Temporary : Some Professionals Find Short-Term Jobs Suit Them Well

More and more white collar workers and professionals are choosing to work a series of short-term jobs as “permanent temporaries” in order to fend off the boredom and drudgery of regular full-time employment.

“When you think of temporaries, you think of secretaries, stenographers, word processors and bookkeepers,” said Ronald Cameron, whose 18-year-old company provides pharmacists for temporary jobs in drug stores and hospitals in California, Arizona and Colorado.

“Pharmacists love it because it gives them a little more flexibility in their schedule than they would have in the traditional manner, in the same drug store day after day, year after year,” he said.

His company, Cameron and Co., the Pharmacists’ Registry, in the Los Angeles suburb of Rolling Hills Estates, works like the temporary-help companies that have traditionally provided secretarial employees and field laborers.

It draws from a pool of workers to fill short-term assignments. Employees are paid by the registry company, which keeps a percentage of the money paid by the employer and handles details such as tax withholding.

But his firm employs only pharmacists and is one of an increasing number of professional temporary firms.

Fast-Growing Field

The temporary-service industry in general boomed during the 1970s, growing at a healthy 19% annually, and is still growing about twice as fast as the gross national product.

In 1987, the industry employed about 6 million workers with an average of 944,000 assigned to a job on any given day. Clerical and secretarial jobs still account for two-thirds of the positions, and another 15% are blue-collar industrial jobs such as assembly line work or packing and shipping goods.

But the fastest growth has occurred in the white-collar fields, mostly the technical, engineering and medical areas.

“The business people are just starting to become aware that there is a capability in those areas to use temporaries effectively,” said Sam Sacco, executive vice president of the National Assn. of Temporary Services. “Normally, they would have to make do with overtime or hire somebody and let them go six months later.”

Cameron’s pharmacists often fill in for sick or vacationing employers.

“All state laws say a pharmacy cannot be open without a licensed pharmacist on duty. If somebody has to go away on vacation or is sick or in an accident or whatever, they have no source except this service,” Cameron said.

Typically, however, professional temporaries are hired for a specific project, not to fill in for absentees. Their assignments tend to be longer than those of clerical and secretarial temporaries, where the norm is less than five weeks for one assignment.

A temporary paralegal may work daily for six months to prepare a lawsuit for court, whereas a temporary engineer may work for two years on a single project for a defense contractor.

Reason Is Life Style

Professional temporaries usually are more educated and more highly trained than other temporaries and are apt to choose temporary work for life-style reasons, Sacco said.

“You have a little different mind set. This is somebody that has put a lot of time and effort in their career. They could work full time if they wanted to for the most part, but they like the flexibility and the variety,” he said.

“An engineer might like the design part of a project or the testing part. On a full-time job they would have to do the whole project, including the part they don’t like. Here they can do only that and walk away,” he said.

In the past two decades, the trend has shifted from using temporaries in emergencies to using temporaries regularly during peak work periods or for special projects. They are also used to circumvent hiring freezes, the NATS reported.

That has opened up the field to engineers, surveyors, draftsmen, nurses, laboratory technicians and others whose jobs require college specialty training.

“A lot of firms are just starting to use temporaries,” said Lyn Hill, whose Legal Assistants Corp. employs paralegals for temporary jobs in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Most of the employees in her pool are college graduates who have taken paralegal courses. Some are law students or new lawyers awaiting test results from the bar.

“Sometimes they don’t really know if they want to go to law school. It’s a good way for them to get a look at how law firms work. Other people, maybe they just moved here from another city.

“Sometimes people are actors or actresses or comedians. They do this during the day and pursue their own thing at night. It’s better than waitressing,” Hill said.

Flexibility Is Key

But many have been permanent temporaries for years because they enjoy the flexibility, she said.

The hourly rates for white-collar temporaries are usually comparable to those paid permanent full-time workers in the same field.

Hill’s paralegals make $9 to $15 an hour. Cameron’s pharmacy temporaries make $23 an hour in California, 75 cents an hour more than regular pharmacists make under union wage scales.

“I have heard of temporary technical people making six-figure salaries,” Sacco said. “This is not the norm, but we are talking about a high-demand skill such as a chemist or someone who could demand some good rates for their services.

Temporary professionals may get some benefits such as health insurance and paid vacations if they work steadily. Hill’s paralegals, for example, are eligible for a week’s paid vacation after working 1,500 hours. But they give up pension plans, company cars, profit sharing and other perks.

As in the temporary industry overall, women are disproportionally represented among professional temporaries. The only exception is in the engineering and computer fields, which have been traditionally male-dominated.

Needs of Women Workers

The increasing number of women in the work force has fueled both the number of temporary-job openings and the number of employees available to fill them.

Cameron attributes most of his company’s growth to working women.

“More and more women want flexibility. They want to spend time with their home and husband and children. They don’t want to be tied down to a 40- or 50-hour-a-week job. They want to have more control of their lives,” he said.

Often, his temporaries fill in for pharmacists who are on maternity leave. California law requires that women who take pregnancy leaves must be given their jobs back if they return within four months, so employers cannot hire permanent replacements.

There are about 3,000 or so temporary-help companies with 7,800 offices in the United States. Professionals who want to work in their own fields have a greater chance of doing so if they work with a specialized temporary-help service, the NATS reported.