Do you prefer a permanent job with higher payment and better benefits? Or a temporary job with greater flexibility, experience, skill acquisition, and knowledge divarication?
According to the latest data, the number of temporary workers increase for 50%, which is faster than the number of permanent jobs, from 1.4 million in 1998 to 2.1 million in 2018. Also, the number of temporary jobs with contract positions increases, from 46% to 53%, especially in education, health care and social assistance sectors. In these positions, women take a large share of the temporary workers. In other words, women are more likely than man to have a temporary job.
The primary issue being discussed is temporary employment is often associated with not only less pay but also fewer benefits. The benefits they receive is not same as permanent employees, which means they have to spend more money by themselves to make up the difference of their social care. Moreover, temporary job is not good for establishing a good working environment. It limits the long-term cooperation.
As we mentioned before, since most of the temporary jobs are in sectors of education, health care, and social assistance, women take a larger share of the amount of temporary jobs than men. As a result, it leads to a gender gap and income inequality.
Also, another effect is that they are not receiving enough training by their employers as permanent workers do. However, temporary jobs do have its own strength. It makes workers have a diversification of knowledge and experience about different positions.
The increase of number of temporary jobs may not always be a good thing or bad thing. It has different effects towards various groups of population. “If younger people are working temporary jobs that allow them to pursue further education, their lifetime incomes might be higher,” Nye said. “And, if older people are choosing to stay in the labor force for longer by working a temporary job rather than retiring, that would be positive for their incomes.”
In my opinion, temporary jobs is not always an issue but we need to do something to restrict the growth of temporary jobs.
Yiyao Jiang 
Hi yiyao,
Thank you for your contributions!
In terms of the effect you mention, I agree with your opinion “lack of training opportunities,” and I would like to add one more potential long-term impact, lack of expertise, and high turnover.
In terms of the first point, the impact exists both sides, resulted from the job function of temporary work. For the workers, diversified training distracts their time effort and further prevents them from being an industry or specific job expertise and eventually may lead to the difficulty in securing a job in their mid-age. For the company, the trend of this rise may inhibit the recruitment of experienced candidates. Though the salary growth rate of full-time candidate is lower than temporary workers, they are offered a thorough and structured training, which ensure these employees can fulfill specific needs of a kind of job function in the long term, and those skill-sets and hands-on experience will be a great asset for them if they would like to change career in the future.
Another problem is the high turnover. The turnover rate on the employee is not conducive to create an inclusive and supportive company culture. The continuous changes also result in significant responsibility for human resource management. From the company’s point of view, the investment of human capital is not as profitable as a result of this high turnover. Again, for a rational employer, investing in a person who has a very high probability of leaving is not a rational and reasonable decision. Therefore, the employment relationship will fall into a vicious cycle. Despite threats, it might be able to offset due to the essential function of temporary work.
Mirabelle Tan
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