FEATURE The Temporary Staffing Industry and Workforce Development: Assessing a System of Local Experiments

ABSTRACT Local workforce authorities in liberal market states are increasingly charged with mitigating long-term unemployment rooted in macroeconomic forces beyond their immediate control. In the US, and now elsewhere, these authorities have begun to establish partnerships with the temporary staffing industry as a means of extending their limited resources and improving job placement outcomes. Such partnerships are especially prominent in the US, where the Department of Labor has sanctioned policy experiments between local workforce authorities and the temporary staffing industry. In order to appraise these experiments, we present case-study evaluations of three diverse and highly touted employment schemes undertaken by American workforce authorities in conjunction with temporary staffing agencies. We find that under even the most favourable circumstances, the modest mechanisms of these programmes are unable to produce appreciable impacts within local labour markets. The national-level policy focus in many liberal market states on long-term unemployment poses a daunting task for workforce development authorities, particularly in areas of weak labour demand (Esping-Anderson & Regini, 2000; Peck, 2001; OECD, 2005). On the one hand, these authorities are charged with the task of quickly (re)inserting discouraged jobseekers and other hard-to-employ individuals into local labour markets with little slack to accommodate even highly qualified workers. On the other hand, they typically lack the funding, policy-makin