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August 2004, Vol. 127, No. 8

Précis

Temporary help in Georgia
Family in the fast track
Structural change in New York

Précis from past issues

Temporary help in Georgia

Many analyses of temporary workers are conducted at a very high level of aggregation, perhaps focusing on the potential of the employment series for the temporary help industry to act as a leading indicator of labor market conditions. Other reports focus on the experiences of individual workers, perhaps suggesting that being a "temp" fosters instability or, conversely, that temping may allow individuals to try on different occupations and employers and find a better and more productive fit in the labor force.

In a report in the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Econ South, Julie Hotchkiss walks a very useful middle path. Using unemployment insurance system wage records from the Georgia Department of Labor, she looks at temporary work through the experiences of a relatively large number of individuals.

As many studies have pointed out, aggregate employment in the temporary help services industry is very volatile compared with the rest of the economy. Hotchkiss confirms this finding, "In Georgia, only 64 percent of the workers employed in temporary help services in 2000Q1 were employed in 2002Q4, after the recession. In comparison, about 80 percent of Georgia’s workers in manufacturing and other services and about 74 percent of workers in retail trade were still employed after the recession."

Similarly, workers who were in temporary services before the recession spent an average of 2.3 quarters unemployed during the downturn. In contrast, manufacturing employees were unemployed for an average of 1.1 month, retail trade employees for 1.5 month, and other service industry workers, 1.2 month.

Even among those temporary workers who were employed as of the fourth quarter of 2002, three-quarters were employed by a different firm than the one they were employed in when the recession began. This was a far higher rate of employer change than was recorded for workers in the other industries. However, another unique feature of temporary help employment was that workers in that industry that did change jobs actually made a bit more, on average, in the fourth quarter of 2002 than they had made at their old jobs and those that stayed with the same employer, made a bit less. Hotchkiss concluded, "For many workers, temporary employment provides an entrée into a more permanent position, but, as seen here, that path may prove to be quite rocky."

Family in the fast track

Whether women can have both careers and children (either sequentially or simultaneously) is an issue that evolved over the course of the last century. In "The Long Road to the Fast Track: Career and Family" (NBER Working Paper No. 10331), Claudia Goldin of Harvard University traces this evolution by considering five different cohorts of college graduate women.

The first cohort graduated at the beginning of the 20th century and had a career or a family, but rarely both. The next cohort graduated between the end of World War I and the end of World War II, and tended to have a job and then a family. Women who graduated college between 1946 and the mid-1960s are the third cohort; they often had a family and then a job; according to Goldin’s estimates, only 17 percent of this group had no children by age 40, by far the lowest percentage of all five cohorts. The fourth cohort—graduates from the late 1960s to the late 1970s—often strived to have career first and then family.

Goldin says most about the two most recent cohorts, in part because she can analyze National Longitudinal Survey data that include these groups of college graduate women. Using NLS data, she finds that that 13 to 18 percent of the fourth cohort achieved "career then family" by the time they reached 40. (She gives a range because the percentage depends upon how career is defined.)

Women in the fifth and most recent cohort in Goldin’s study, graduated college from about 1980 to 1990, typically had the objective of combining career and family at the same time. According to Goldin’s analysis, 21 to 28 percent actually realized that goal by age 40. In contrast, 45 to 55 percent of men college graduates in the same age group were able to combine career and family by age 40. Goldin notes, "But even though men managed to achieve career and family about two times as often as women, this is probably the lowest that figure has been in U.S. history."

Structural change in New York

Like the issue of temporary help, structural change is perhaps most often addressed at a very high level of aggregation—the Nation as a whole, for example. The effects of restructuring—especially the employment and displacement effects, generally are felt most acutely, however, at the State and local level. Erica L. Groshen, Simon Potter, and Rebecca J. Sela provide a detailed analysis of how restructuring has affected New York State in the June issue of Current Issues in Economic and Finance from the New York Fed.

Using a method Groshen and Potter applied to the national economy in a 2003 report (see our September 2003 précis), the authors find that the share industries that experience structural change during recent downturns is much higher than it was during the downturns of the 1970s and 1980s. The authors conclude that the New York economy experienced much greater degrees of structural change in the national recessions of the mid-1970s, early 1990s, and, most recently, 2001. As a result, the downturns in the New York economy that were associated with those recessions were of significantly greater duration than were the recessions at the national level.