Explore the vast range of titles available.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of the contingent work field and to advocate a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.Design/methodology/approachAdopting a broader review approach allowed to synthesize the contingent work literature across contingent work types (temporary agency work, gig work and freelance work) and develop a sustainable career perspective on contingent work. The authors searched for empirical, conceptual and review articles published from 2008 to December 2021. In total, the authors included 208 articles.FindingsThe authors advocate a sustainable career perspective that allows for organizing and synthesizing the fragmented contingent work literature. Adopting a sustainable career perspective enables to study contingent work from a dynamic perspective transcending one single organization.Originality/valueThe field is suffering from fragmentation and most importantly from an oversight of how contingent work experiences play a role in a persons’ career. This paper addresses this problem by adopting a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

On average, temporary jobs are far less stable than permanent jobs. This higher instability could potentially lower workers’ incentives to relocate towards the workplace, thereby resulting in longer commutes. However, surprisingly few studies have investigated the link between temporary employment and commuting length. Building on the notion that individuals strive to optimize their utility when deciding where to work and live, we develop and test a theoretical framework that predicts commuting outcomes for different types of temporary workers – fixed-term, casual and temporary agency workers – and in different institutional contexts. We estimate fixed-effects regression models using 17 waves of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). As expected, the results show that the link between temporary employment and commuting length varies by employment type and institutional context. Agency work is associated with longer commutes than permanent work in both countries, whereas this applies to fixed-term contracts for Germany only. For casual work, the findings suggest no commuting length differential to permanent employment. In terms of policy, our findings suggest lengthy commuting can be a side effect of flexible labour markets, with potentially negative implications for worker well-being, transportation management and the environment.

Objectives Evidence is growing that non-standard employment is associated with adverse health. However, little is known about the relationship between different non-standard employment arrangements and subsequent all-cause and cause-specific mortality. Using population-wide data, the present study investigated this link. Methods Data was derived from the 2001 Belgian census and a 13-year-long follow-up. The analyses comprised 1 454 033 healthy and disability-free employees aged 30-59 years at baseline. Cox regressions were fitted to analyze the mortality risks of those in non-standard employment forms (temporary agency, seasonal, fixed-term, causal work and employment program) compared to permanent employees. Results Several groups of workers in non-standard employment arrangements in 2001 exhibited a higher mortality risk relative to permanent employees during the follow-up after adjusting for socio-economic and work-related factors. This was especially the case among men. The relative mortality disadvantage was particularly elevated for male temporary agency workers. External causes of death played an important role in this association. Conclusions A mortality gradient between the core and outer periphery of the Belgian labor market has been observed. This study also shows that the excess risk of death, previously attributed to non-permanent employment as a whole, hides inequalities between specific forms of non-standard work (eg, temporary agency, seasonal, fixed-term employment).

Day labor, the practice of searching for work in open-air, informal markets such as street corners or in formal temp agencies, has become an increasingly visible and important means of securing employment for a broad segment of immigrant, primarily male, displaced workers. Our understanding of day labor has been limited by regionally focused or city-based case studies, poorly constructed methodological approaches, inconsistent definitions, and little comparative research. This review discusses the emerging research on day labor, paying particular attention to the practice of day labor, including the market's origins, its contemporary development, and its hiring and wage practices. The review also provides a synopsis of informal, open-air and formal temp agency day labor practices, their spatial and organizational configurations, and an outline of the legal issues and public policies that structure, to a large degree, worker and employer relations in this industry. The review emphasizes the multidisciplinary nature of contributions to the topic, including research by sociologists, anthropologists, and urban studies. Areas for future research are suggested.

Objectives: Precarious employment conditions have become more common in many countries over the last decades, and have been linked to various adverse health outcomes. The objective of this review was to collect and summarize existing scientific research of the relationship between dimensions of precarious employment and the rate of occupational injuries. Methods: A protocol was developed in accordance with the PRISMA-P checklist for systematic literature reviews. We searched PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus for articles on observational studies from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand published in peer-reviewed journals 1990-2017. A minimum of two independent reviewers assessed each article with respect to quality and eligibility criteria. Articles of high/ moderate quality meeting all specified inclusion criteria were included in the review. Results: The literature search resulted in 471 original titles, of which 17 articles met all the inclusion criteria. The most common exposures were in descending order; temporary employment, multiple jobs, working for a subcontractor at the same worksite/temp agency, part-time, self-employment, hourly pay, union membership, insurance benefits, flexible versus fixed work schedule, wages, job insecurity, work-time control and precarious career trajectories. Ten studies reported a positive association between precarious employment and occupational injuries. Four studies reported a negative association, and three studies did not show any significant association. Conclusions: This review supports an association between some of the dimensions of precarious employment and occupational injuries; most notably for multiple jobholders and employees of temp agencies or subcontractors at the same worksite. However, results for temporary employment are inconclusive. There is a need for more prospective studies of high quality, designed to measure effect sizes as well as causality.

In the construction project, the temporary work is the construction work, which is installed temporarily for the construction of main structure and removed after its completion. Even though it is a temporary facility used and demolished only during the construction phase, it accounts for about 10% of the total construction cost. In addition, it is an important work directly connected to the cost and quality of construction, so that the completeness of the building depends on the technology of the temporary work. Therefore, it is necessary to manage it through systematic quality inspection activities. In order to perform a systematic quality inspection, it is essential that detailed and specific inspection activities, such as inspecting the conformity of the design and construction and its compliance with relevant standards based on construction inspection information, such as drawings, specifications, and checklists, are carried out. However, most of the construction inspection information about the temporary work does not include any specific information in documents (drawings, specifications, etc.). Additionally, the direct temporary work among the temporary works is treated as an auxiliary work of the main structure work in the construction site, although it is the construction work based on the work breakdown structure. Accordingly, the quality control engineer must manually check only the contents of the temporary work among the construction inspection information that covers the overall construction work. Additionally, the probability of human error is increased, as the quality control engineer manually carries out the quality inspection tasks, such as preparing the inspection-related materials and checklist and writing the inspection result report. This leads to inefficiency and problems such as re-provisioning for inspection and re-inspection. Therefore, it is necessary to construct a business process that can efficiently carry out the quality inspection work by complementing and improving the above problems involving the temporary work, which is performed most inefficiently. In this study, a BIM-based quality inspection system prototype for temporary works was developed that can automate tasks and systematically store and manage various types of inspection information for each of the temporary facilities in order to improve the efficiency of the quality inspection carried out by the quality control engineer. As a result, a process designed to improve the quality inspection of the temporary work, which can perform the quality inspection work, is proposed. Additionally, the quality of the works related to quality control is improved through improvements in the accuracy and efficiency of the works and simplification of the existing manual work procedures through the proposed business improvement process.

The negative impact of unemployment on individuals and its spillover to spouses is widely documented. However, we have a gap in our knowledge when it comes to the similar consequences of temporary employment. This is problematic, because although temporary jobs are often considered better alternatives to unemployment for endowing individuals with income and opportunities to connect to employers, they are also associated with stressors such as high levels of job insecurity and poor quality work, the effects of which might spill over to spouses. Using matched data from the British Household Panel Study, I show that temporary work is at least as detrimental as unemployment for spouses’ subjective well-being, although there are differences. When experienced by husbands, temporary work, like unemployment, has a negative effect on wives’ psychological well-being and life satisfaction. Yet, as opposed to unemployment, wives’ temporary employment also spills over and negatively affects husbands’ psychological well-being. Furthermore, coupled individuals’ well-being is most affected when men are either unemployed or temporarily employed and their wives have permanent jobs, suggesting that the effect is related to gender deviation. The effects are robust after controlling for fixed individual characteristics that can influence both employment status and well-being outcomes.

This article investigates the role of temporary work agencies (TWAs) at Foxconn’s assembly plants in the Czech Republic. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it shows TWAs’ comprehensive management of migrant labour: recruitment and selection in the countries of origin; cross-border transportation, work and living arrangements in the country of destination; and return to the countries of origin during periods of low production. The article asks whether the distinctiveness of this specific mode of labour management can be understood adequately within the framework of existing theories on the temporary staffing industry. In approaching the staffing industry through the lens of migration labour analysis, the article reveals two key findings. Firstly, TWAs are creating new labour markets but do so by eroding workers’ rights and enabling new modalities of exploitation. Secondly, the diversification of TWAs’ roles and operations has transformed TWAs from intermediaries between capital and labour to enterprises in their own right.