The Contest over “Employer” Status in the Postwar United States: The Case of Temporary Help Firms

This study examines the sociolegal underpinnings of the “temporary help” relationship as one kind of contingent work arrangement and explores how it became institutionalized in the post-World War II United States. While the American literature on contingent work suggests its tremendous growth has been merely a result of changing “human resource” strategies on the part of business managers, the focus here is on the specific role played by courts, state legislatures, and government administrative bodies in ratifying the temporary help arrangement as legal and legitimate. The article details the obscure history of the campaign waged by temporary help firms to win their claim as the legal employers of workers they send out to client firms, a central premise of the arrangement. It shows that statutory and policy changes supporting the increased use of “temporary work” were in place by the early 1970s, in time for its expanded use to play a key role in the restructuring of U.S. employment relations since that time.