The "temp," once the anonymous fill-in secretary, has moved across the factory floor and up the corporate ladder.
Thanks to continuing layoffs and corporate cost-cutting, temps may include the mill worker who helps make your kitchen cabinets, the attorney who reviews your company's health insurance policy, the doctor who tests your blood, or even the executive who runs your company.
Temporary jobs are the fastest-growing kind of job in the nation. And nonsecretarial, nontraditional jobs are the fastest growing kind of temporary jobs, says Linda Kaestner, managing director for the Baltimore area offices of the Snelling and Snelling Inc. temporary agency.
The use of temporary workers is now a "management tool," used in every sector of the economy, she said.
Indeed, temporary services companies alone accounted for nearly 900,000 jobs created since January 1992, more than any other sector of the economy. And the number of Americans employed by temporary agencies surpassed the 2 million mark this summer.
The number of temporary workers is probably much higher, though. The government doesn't count as temporary workers those who are not contracted through an agency, such as the 400 temporary workers General Motors Corp. has hired to help out at Baltimore's Astro van assembly plant.
As recently as 1991, Snelling placed about 200 temporary secretaries a day in the Baltimore region, and only a handful of other kinds of workers.
Today, Snelling will send out perhaps 240 secretaries. But it also will send out more than 100 blue-collar workers, and 50 accountants or other professionals. And by next year, Ms. Kaestner predicts, there will be dozens of temporary scientists and lab technicians working every day in the region.
That's a mixed blessing for companies and workers. Temporary jobs can improve corporate flexibility and can be lifesavers for the jobless.
But the boom in temporary jobs is hard on the more millions of Americans who now work at jobs with few benefits and no job security.
And temporary jobs are being blamed for everything from a continuing depression in consumer confidence to labor unrest.
The downside of the boom doesn't seem to worry most employers, though.
For although companies continue to cut costs and staff, there is still plenty of work to do. And, ironically, because of mass corporate layoffs, there are plenty of jobless but qualified people willing to do the work -- who will accept lower pay, and can be sent home without a penny of severance on a moment's notice. At USF&G;, which has cut its work force by nearly 6,000 since Dec. 1990, deputy general counsel Jay K. Huber was at first hesitant to hire temporary attorneys to handle a crush of work. He thought there was probably something wrong with attorneys who couldn't get permanent jobs.
"I was very skeptical what kind of quality we were going to get," he said.
But a temporary service sent him impressive resumes -- including many from lawyers who had been laid off from prestigious firms.
"I was wrong," Mr. Huber said. Now, the Baltimore-based insurer uses temporary lawyers a couple times a month. "It has turned out really well."
For some companies, temps have become a standard response to economic cycles. A growing number of companies have reduced their permanent work force in order to take on temporaries during busy times. They then cut back to a smaller core of regulars during slack times.
At TIC Gums, Inc., a Belcamp-based maker of food ingredients, the production staff has been pared from 35 to 30 over the last two years, and managers call a temporary service to provide anything from cleaners to bag-fillers for busy times.
The company got rid of permanent "floaters" because they couldn't meet the sometimes intense demands for work, and at other times had nothing to do, she said.
So now TIC uses about 10 temps a month -- each for a couple of days -- to fill in, she said. TIC uses the temps even though they cost more per hour than its permanent employees because they are less expensive and more convenient over the long haul. (Temp workers usually receive as their hourly wage between half and two-thirds of the fee paid for their services.)
"Two or three years ago we were kind of overstaffed," said Barbara Hamm, human resources manager for the company.
"We are getting more sophisticated. . . . We're trying to work smarter, not harder."
The need for emergency help reaches to the highest corporate levels.
Valerie Hart, a principal in Symphony Management Inc., said her Annapolis-based venture capital firm used a temporary chief executive officer to take care of a crisis in a company it controls.
She said she had never heard of temporary executives until about two years ago. Now, she said, more and more companies are bringing in temporary managers to oversee the introduction of new products, or save a company from bankruptcy. "It is the Zeitgeist," she said, using a German word that means an idea common to an era.
"People are getting more and more used to more flexible structures," she said.
Some managers are using temps to fill all their openings, in order to test out applicants for future permanent jobs.
Steven Mills, personnel manager at Conestoga Wood Specialties Inc. in Darlington, started using temporaries because the increasing complexity of labor laws makes it difficult to hire or fire workers.
He's currently trying out a temporary worker in a maintenance job.
"You don't get into all the things you've got to do to terminate" someone, such as documenting performance problems and possibly fighting a lawsuit, he said.
For many managers though, temporaries are simply a replacement for permanent workers.
Julie Pinnix, controller of Senior Campus Living Inc. of Baltimore, has been hiring temporary accountants off and on for the last two years. In years past, she might have hired a permanent accountant instead. "But it is harder to justify a year-round person" to higher-ups watching budgets, she said.
And she predicted, more companies are going to use temporaries where they might have used permanent workers in the past.
Some professionals are choosing temporary work for variety's sake, or to test out the job market.
Howard Saiontz, a Baltimore oncologist, travels the country filling in for vacationing or injured doctors.
"It is an adventure," said the 45-year-old cancer specialist. "I've HTC been to New England during the fall foliage season . . . and I love Montana."
Although temporary physicians earn less than counterparts who have full-time practices, Dr. Saiontz is seeing more beginning physicians experiment with temporary jobs, partly because there seems to be a glut of physicians in cities like Baltimore and partly as a way to choose where they'd like to practice.
"It is a way of letting themselves into the profession. They can explore options," he said.
But for millions of Americans, the only options are low-paying temporary work or no work at all.
For, according to the National Association of Temporary Services, most temps receive less than $7 an hour. And only one out of 11 temporary workers receives health insurance from a temp service.
For job seekers like Peter Duvall, a certified public accountant who has been looking for work since early this summer, temporary work is a leaky lifeboat at best.
For now, Mr. Duvall said, his prospects for permanent work are "nil" because the accounting market is glutted.
Although he has gotten several temp assignments, he's slowly draining his savings account because temp pay doesn't cover his bills. He keeps cutting his budget because "I never know when the money is going to come in."
One way the 35-year-old Charles Village man has reduced his expenses: He bought an inexpensive health insurance policy that will pay for only the direst emergency. Now, he jokes darkly, if he gets sick, he'll have to "run outside and get hit by a bus" in order to get the insurance to pay for his care.
"I couldn't live this way forever," he said.
Mr. Duvall has mixed feelings about employers' shift from permanent to temporary work.
"In some places it makes absolute sense," he said. "There is enough work for 1- 1/2 professionals. It is hard to hire a half of a professional, so I can't blame them" for hiring a temporary. "I would do exactly the same thing."
But other companies, he said, "are just exploiting a person" by hiring a lower-paid temp without benefits rather than a permanent hire.
Union officials warn that too many companies are exploiting temporary workers.
The temp boom, they believe, is not just bad for a few million workers. It's bad for everyone.
The creation of a two-tier workforce creates dissension in the workplace, they warn. Worse, in the long run, workers without job security will hold back on purchases, thus hurting sales of the companies that hire them.
Rodney Trump, president of Baltimore' United Auto Workers Local 237, said one reason the General Motors Corp. has been facing strike votes across the country is its increasing reliance on temporary factory workers.
In Baltimore, for example, the union is pushing GM to convert the approximately 400 temporary production workers at the Broening Highway plant to permanent hires.
"It's not right to ask people to do the same job for $5 an hour less, no benefits and no job security. That creates two tiers of workers."
"It's un-American," he added.
Even economists who think the temp boom is good for the economy are sounding some warnings.
Martin Gannon, a professor of management at the University of Maryland at College Park, predicted more companies are going to shift to a "core and ring" strategy, in which a core of permanent workers will be augmented by a "ring" of temporaries.
That's good news for the U.S. economy because the way temporary agencies match the supplies of workers to companies' demands makes companies more efficient, he said.
The temp boom "definitely, overall, is good for the economy," he said.
But what's good for the economy in general may not be good for his loved ones in particular.
When his daughter graduated from college last year, "I told her not to work temp," Mr. Gannon admitted. "The wages are low" and she would be better off concentrating on getting a permanent job.