May 02, 2001 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Two-thirds of temporary workers employed in services or manufacturing

Temporary workers were most often assigned to work in the manufacturing and services industries in 1999. Relative to traditional workers, they were much more likely to be working in manufacturing and much less likely to be in wholesale and retail trade.

[Chart data—TXT]

The percentage of temporary help agency workers in the services industry was slightly larger (38.7 percent to 35.2 percent) than for traditional workers. By a ratio of nearly 2-to-1, however, temporary workers were more likely than workers in traditional arrangements to work in manufacturing. This ratio was more than reversed in the wholesale and retail trade industry, where traditional workers were represented more than 2.5 times as often.

These data are from a February supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS). Find out more in "Characteristics of and preference for alternative work arrangements, 1999," by Marisa DiNatale, Monthly Labor Review, March 2001. 

Related TED articles:

• Occupations of independent contractors
• Less than 10 percent of workers in nontraditional arrangements