Leiharbeit in Österreich: Übergangslösung oder Sackgasse?

Abstract: Currently, a little more than 1% of all the employees in Austria are provided by temporary works or staff leasing agencies. The temporary hiring out of employees, commonly known as temporary work is a type of labour that seems to meet our economy's needs for flexibility in a perfect way. It is also increasingly used as a strategic element in staff policy. At the same time, the temporary provision of employees presents an atypical employment relationship that involves a lot of opportunities as well as risks for the employees. Depending on the individual point of view, temporary agency work may either be seen as a modern and flexible form of labour, as a part of today's "lifestyle", or as a "modern form of slavery". This paper describes the situation of temporary agency work in Austria. At first, there will be a rough outline of the discussion about temporary agency work since the Seventies. After that, all the relevant legal regulations in connection with temporary agency work are presented, and the currently available data are used to demonstrate the extent and development of temporary agency work. This also includes a critical view on the validity of the basic data. The formal/quantitative portrayal is complemented by various results of qualitative analyses dealing with the "everyday conditions of temporary agency work", as well as by expert opinions taken from interviews that were carried out during the course of this project.