The temporary staffing industry and workforce development: Assessing a system of local experiments

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.