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Comment by cabbeer | Hacker News Reader

Temp work is bad in the long term. Employers do not have to provide benefits for temporary employees, and they also have access to less privileges from the government. This approach is a race to the bottom IMO.

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"Temp work is bad in the long term."

I'm not trying to be an anus, but temp stands for temporary which is not long term. It looks like they are looking to improve individual skills that are in demand in order to progress to a full-time job. Once they have relevant actual experience with companies it will be much easier to find a long term employment situation.

I mean, in storybook land this is how things should work.

But in the recent past, the most recent decade especially, companies have infamously been using temp jobs as a means to get around paying full-time salaries and benefits perpetually. Same with internships. For lower level white-collar workers, the progression isn't from temp job to permanent job but temp job to temp job to temp job to early underfunded retirement.

Not that I see an easy way out of this--companies of all sorts are driven to this behavior inexorably by the market--but people genuinely interested in transitioning to a better economy for everyone have to look at this fact head on.

In real life land, people are responsible for their own careers. Temp jobs are an option if a worker so chooses and not a cure all. If a temp job to get a temp paycheck to get temp experience does not help fulfill their goals then they should not choose it.

Many forces shaping employment options are considerably larger than any one individual's choices about their own career, so I think it's fair (and important) to look at systemic trends, and what effect they have. Of course, in the short term, each person also has to make their own decisions with the systemic factors as they currently exist, so I don't entirely disagree.

I agree with you that there are many forces that shape options, but my original point was that temp work is an option. My original reply was to someone that threw out a blanket statement that all temp work was bad in the long term. Surely there are some temp workers that can benefit in the long term from the skills that they will learn and the additional income.

Is this anything more than a clever rhetorical move to put the onus on lower level workers who are struggling to deal with systemic changes?

My statement is purely descriptive, which I note you don't controvert. White collar temp jobs have substantially increased their share of the economy relative to the mid-20th century. And the structure over time of career progression is also substantially changed as a result of that.

Saying, "well, they chose to do it" sidesteps analyzing the systemic issues. No more than saying "well, black people choose to work for less pay than white people" analyzes anything meaningful.

When temp jobs and underemployment become your only option, a company has created a de facto way to avoid providing benefits that would normally be considered standard to any other kind of employee. The growth of temp jobs and unpaid internships shows that companies will exploit the demand for any kind of employment this way and it is hugely unethical.

This problem has a simple legal fix: trigger benefits requirements when the job has full time work, not full time employees.

Folks are free to look for full-time gigs. But such short-term projects can provide invaluable experience that can help people get actually accepted to full-time jobs. Arguably, past experience is the most important factor in job hunting. When one applies to even some low-level white collar job, there's a huge difference between having no relevant experience (flipped 'em burgers for the past 2 years), and having 2-3 temporary data entry positions over the past year.

The partnership is centered around the job training programs, not a partnership with temp agencies. The goal is exactly the opposite of a race to the bottom, it's providing skills and real world training, something that will then be marketable at the conclusion of the program.

It sounds like the real-world skills are writing for a content farm or stuff a half-step above mechanical turk. Do they translate into real-world jobs anyone would want?

Good question!

Software testing, online research, and high-quality writing correspond directly to marketable technology and professional skills development.

It's important to remember that these individuals often come from a low-technology background, and are training to develop foundational technology skills -- not highly-specialized skills.

I agree high-quality writing is a solid skill, but I worry whether content-farm writing is a particularly plausible inroads into that. I suppose it can help improve writing skills from completely nonexistent up to the level of being able to string words together, but I'm not sure writing articles along the lines of what you find on eHow is going to help you land a more solid writing job, like technical documentation. In the worst case, it could count as worse than no experience to mention on your CV, since that kind of writing has a poor reputation.

Hopefully I'm wrong, but I think there are a lot of entry-level jobs that are sort of dead-end and don't really develop into a skill ladder, which is something to watch out for.

I might agree with you about traditional temping. However, this isn't temping! Work for America is the practical component of a job training program that concludes with transitioning workers into full-time jobs.

Many individuals have difficulty in traditional job training in finding full-time work without practical work experience, so this resolves that problem.

I agree, but temp work is better than no work and it'll allow newbies te get some experience.

I agree. Someone should magically conjure full-time work instead.

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