Flexible Staffing Arrangements and Employers' Short-Term Adjustment Strategies

No 2617, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper reports new evidence from a survey of over 408 U.S. employers concerning their use of temporary and on-call workers. More than 90 percent of responding organizations reported reliance on these flexible staffing arrangements. They accounted for an average of 1.5 percent of total labor input at user organizations during 1985; at some organizations, they accounted for 10 percent or even 20 percent of total labor input. Four-fifths of survey respondents indicated that flexible staffing arrangements play an important role in absorbing workload fluctuations. Moreover, organizations with highly seasonal or highly cyclical demand made significantly greater use of flexible staffing arrangements during 1985 than organizations with less seasonal or less cyclical demand. The use of flexible staffing arrangements appears to be a more important component of employers' short-term adjustment strategies than has previously been recognized.

Date: Written 1988-06
Note: LS
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Published as Employment, Unemployment adn Labour Utilization, pp288-311, 1988. (ed) R. A. Hart. London: Unwin Hyman Press

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2617.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2617
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().