International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Volume 25.3 September 2001

Contingent Chicago: Restructuring the
Spaces of Temporary Labor*
JAMIE PECK AND NIK THEODORE

Introduction: shitty jobs in a booming economy
It is the Spring of 1999 and the Chicago economy is booming. The unemployment rate is
at a record low (at just 3.6% for the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area in March 1999,
according to official figures) and ‘help wanted’ signs seem to be everywhere. But when
the Metropolitan Water District of Greater Chicago announced that 30–60 jobs were to
become available in the city’s sewage treatment plants, officials found themselves
inundated by some 6,761 jobseekers, who lined up outside Chicago’s Medinah Temple
for a chance of a (dirty, but relatively secure) job paying $15.08 per hour. Many had taken
a day off from their regular jobs to be there, but were disappointed to hear that the jobs
would go — quite literally — to just the lucky few. In order to cope with the excess
number of applicants, district officials decided that they would offer the positions to those
individuals whose Social Security numbers most closely matched the winning draw on
the next Illinois State Lottery. The chosen candidates would then have to pass a physical
examination, including tests for drugs and agility, before being offered a position. They
would then have to work for between 6 and 12 months on probation before being made
‘permanent’. According to West Side resident, Willie Fry, ‘This shows how badly we
need the work’ (Chicago Sun-Times, 1 April 1999: 1).
This view of the Chicago labor market is curiously at odds with the official discourse
of regional economic revival, based on strong sales and export growth, improvements in
productivity and expansive recruitment plans (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 1997).
As the Federal Reserve’s president, Michael Moskow, has remarked, ‘the Rust Belt of old
[has] become an apparently high-performing economy’. If there is a cloud on the business
horizon, it is that continuing labor shortages threaten to choke off Chicago’s new-found
competitiveness, as employers have begun to complain that ‘the region’s growth may
become a hostage to continued worker shortages’ (Bergen, 1997: 1). These complaints are
unlikely to ring true for many of Chicago’s inner-city residents, particularly those from
Latino and African-American communities, who must contend with persistent problems
of under-employment, unemployment and poverty (Carlson and Theodore, 1995;
Theodore, 1995; Wilson, 1996). Indeed, the period following the wave of restructuring
and job loss in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which Chicago’s ‘high-performance
economy’ has been reconstructed, saw the income gap between whites on the one hand
* Support for the research reported here was provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,
Chicago Urban League, and the Harkness Fellowships program of the Commonwealth Fund (New York).
Thanks to Chris Benner, George Gonos, Davis Jenkins, Chirag Mehta, David Ranney and Karel Williams for
helpful discussions on an earlier version of the article. Responsibility for its contents, though, remains ours.
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Figure 1

Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore

Example of a temp agency recruiting flier

and Latinos and African Americans on the other actually widen (Chicago Urban League,
1994). In the face of an ostensibly booming regional economy, many inner-city residents
remain trapped in, or between, low-paying, dead-end jobs.
Part of the explanation for this paradox lies with the geographic restructuring of the
Chicago labor market. The downturn of the early 1980s gutted the fragile job base of the
city’s neighborhoods where closures and layoffs had a disproportionate impact. Some
major employers — such as Stewart Warner, Sunbeam and Playskool — shifted their
operations overseas in search of cheap labor, while others headed for the suburbs. Since
1972, the city of Chicago’s share of metropolitan-area employment had fallen from 56%
to just 34% in 1996.1 In fact, in the context of a booming metropolitan economy, the city
was losing jobs at a faster rate in the 1990s than in the 1980s, with manufacturers leading
the rush to the suburbs (see Immergluck and Wiles, 1998). More than 60% of recent
metropolitan-area job growth has occurred in suburban Cook and DuPage Counties. One
consequence of this has been to fracture the employment networks of many inner-city
residents, who now find themselves trapped in low-income, poorly-serviced neighborhoods which are at a considerable distance from suburban growth centers (Immergluck,
1996; 1998; Theodore, 1998). With few opportunities to capitalize on work experience
and skills, many inner-city residents have endured long spells of unemployment, turning
to poorly-paying jobs such as security guards and nursing aides when better opportunities
could not be found (Wilson, 1996). Under-employment has become a systemic condition
in these neighborhoods. As Katherine Newman (1999: 62) has observed of a similar
situation in New York City, stories of seller’s markets for labor in the suburbs sound ‘like
news from another planet’ to many inner-city residents.
Yet in the Chicago case, just as the restructuring process has remade the map of
employment opportunities, so too has this altered labor-market geography created a spur for
new restructuring strategies. While secure, decent-paying jobs may continue to be in shortsupply in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Chicago, the city’s ‘contingent economy’ —
based on flexible, short-time and temporary employment — has been booming. Indeed, the
fastest-growing industry in the metropolitan economy has been specifically targeting
certain low-income neighborhoods in order to access the one resource they have in
abundant supply — cheap and flexible labor. Temporary help services, or temp agencies,
1 Authors’ calculations, derived from Illinois Department of Employment Security (1998).
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have flooded Chicago’s inner-city neighborhoods over the past decade, eager to take
advantage of their highly elastic and under-utilized labor pools. In some low-income
neighborhoods, the four or five largest ‘local employers’ are temp agencies, most of which
specialize in the placement of ‘day-labor’ through a network of hiring halls.2 Here, the
absence of ‘regular’ jobs has rendered local residents dependent on temp employment, and
on the vagaries of the contingent economy. Correspondingly, in locating proximate to these
under-employed labor supplies, temp agencies demonstrate a strong sensitivity to the
micro-geography of the urban labor market. The imperative of securing access to an
‘appropriately contingent’ labor supply — of willing, able, pliable and above all available
workers — is tending to induce spatial agglomeration among temp agencies, many of
which are located just across the street from their competitors. In this case, their locational
strategies reflect the fact that they are competing for labor as well as contracts.
It is not unusual for hiring halls to operate for 24 hours a day, dispatching workers across
the metropolitan area to meet employers’ needs in assembly work, hand-packaging,
materials moving, and other manual-labor assignments in the manufacturing and
warehousing sectors. The physical appearance, geographic location and business names
of these inner-city hiring halls point unambiguously to their function as traders of minimally
processed labor-power. They typically occupy run-down storefronts, often with boarded
windows. The interior decor is spartan and often shabby, with uncarpeted floors and hard
benches or plastic seats, designed for waiting around for job orders to be dispatched through
a window to the office in the back. And typical business names are appropriately literal —
Labor World, Ready Men, Temps Unlimited, World of Temps, Good Workers Inc.,
Minutemen, Days & Nights, Flash Employment, Laborama and, irony surely unintended,
Labor Power Inc. Outside the hiring halls, would-be workers mill around waiting for a job
assignment. Such is the elasticity of labor supply in these neighborhoods, agencies which
find themselves short for an order one day can simply pass out fliers on the street (see Figure
1) in order to generate an expanded pool of recruits, literally within hours. So, these areas
present day-labor contractors with an ample — and highly elastic — local supply of
‘contingent workers’ or, more precisely, workers whose social and economic circumstances
render them contingent. Business viability for these agencies turns on their ability to
efficiently exploit depressed, inner-city labor pools, and the locational strategies they adopt
strongly reflect these imperatives. While it is common for big corporate agencies like
Manpower and Kelly to locate near their business clients in suburban office parks or in
Chicago’s downtown, the ‘low-end’ agencies which are the focus of this article are most
often located near to their preferred labor supply — in low-income neighborhoods. Most
vividly, many such agencies are now clustering around the immediate sources of minimumwage labor, such as homeless shelters and welfare offices (see Theodore, 2000).
Complementing an earlier article in which we examined the restructuring of the temp
‘industry’ (Peck and Theodore, 1998), this article focuses on the segment of the industry
that operates in minimum-wage labor markets. This, it must be emphasized, is but one
element of a complex and growing temp sector, which reaches into professional labor
2 We use the term ‘hiring hall’ here in line with local industry conventions. The temporary staffing industry is
organizationally diverse, ranging from locally-owned storefront agencies supplying factory workers to
multinational corporations supplying a wide range of clerical, industrial and professional occupations. Here,
we use the term ‘hiring hall’ to refer to neighborhood-based temporary staffing agencies that supply daylaborers usually at or around minimum wage for manual work assignments. Hiring halls is an apt term for
these agencies which provide waiting areas for workers who assemble in search of shift work in factories,
warehouses and construction sites. Workers are dispatched from these waiting areas to business clients on an
as-needed basis. As a result, for any worker, work opportunities may or may not be available on any given
day, and physical presence at the agency’s hiring hall is a prerequisite for the opportunity to be placed.
Definitionally, hiring halls are distinct from less formalized ‘labor corners’, where workers congregate on
designated street corners in search of work, as these workers are not ‘placed’ in employment by an agency;
neither should they be confused with union hiring halls, where work allocation procedures are controlled by
labor unions. In some parts of the country, hiring halls are also known as ‘shape-ups’ or ‘shape-up halls’.
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markets in its higher echelons, through the stereotypically-dominant office temp market in
the middle of the hierarchy, down to the day-labor sector at the bottom.3 We concentrate
here on the latter, ‘low-end’ segment of the industry for three reasons: first, it has been one
of the fastest growing sectors in the 1990s, more than doubling in size between 1990 and
1997; second, this now represents one of the most important sources of work in low-income
neighborhoods; and third, the activities of agencies in the lower reaches of the market draw
attention to the social and geographical consequences of this form of privatized ‘labormarket intermediation’. In one respect, temp agencies are simply businesses, and as such
are driven to minimize costs and maximize profits just like any other business, but because
the business of temp agencies is processing and supplying workers, their actions and
strategies also have a direct bearing on the way that labor markets operate. In a nutshell,
temp agencies have a business interest in stretching the envelope of labor-market
contingency (their ‘market’), so as to open up new business opportunities in the trade of
flexible workers. They must consequently be seen as active institutional agents in the
remaking of labor-market norms and conventions, brokering as they do between underemployed workers on the one hand and would-be employers of contingent labor on the
other, while turning a profit in the process. As Burawoy (1985: 265) has observed, a
consequence of the rise of temp agencies is that ‘the distribution of jobs is clouded in
mystery’. Here, we attempt to shed some new light on this process by examining the
employment strategies/business practices of temp agencies in Chicago. Reflecting the fact
that defiance of accurate quantitative description is an industry characteristic — given its
overall fluidity and turbulence and given that a certain proportion of agencies are operating
at the edges of, or beyond, the bounds of legality — it is as much through necessity as
choice that the analysis presented here rests primarily on a series of in-depth interviews
with managers of temp agencies. Where feasible, this is augmented with quantitative data
on local industry trends and patterns, though these also provide no more than a partial view
of what is a complex, fast-changing and to some extent subterranean industry.4
In the next section of the article we outline the key characteristics of ‘reflexive
restructuring’ in the temp industry, which has been diversifying functionally in recent
years, as well as growing at an unprecedented rate. The shape of the temp sector in
Chicago is also briefly sketched. This is followed by two sections which draw on
interview data with agency managers and hiring-hall supervisors in Chicago, the first of
which considers the basic modus operandi of the temp agency — connecting workers
with job assignments in a flexible and low-cost way — while the second explores some of
the distributional consequences of this for the process of (local) labor segmentation — as
patterns of exclusion and inequality in the labor market are being intensified. The
geographical outcomes of temp agencies’ strategies are also considered here. The article
is concluded with some observations on the role of temp-agency strategies in the reregulation of urban labor markets. We argue that the growth of temp working in inner-city
Chicago represents more than a vivid empirical case, more even than the ‘dark side’ of
US-style job flexibility, but that it should also be seen as theoretically provocative. Temp
agencies are remaking the ‘rules’ of disadvantaged urban labor markets, their strategies
also illustrating one of the ways in which the restructuring of both production systems and
labor-market institutions are closely related to the local constitution of the labor supply.
Moreover, the complex institutionalization of temp hiring and placement strategies
3 Numerically, the largest occupational groups in the American temp labor force are secretarial/office
workers and laborers/operators, each of which accounts for around one-third of total employment;
professional and technical occupations account for a further 20%. In contrast, the penetration rate of
temping is highest in low-wage occupations in general, and especially in data-processing, manual
laboring, plant operative work, clerical and hand assembly/fabrication, where on average around one in
ten of all workers in these occupations is a temp. On the composition of the temp labor force, see
Rosenberg and Lapidus (1999) and GAO (2000).
4 The interviews reported here were carried out by the authors between June 1996 and April 1999.
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underscores the fact that even this highly commodified and marketized segment of the
labor market is socially structured and socially regulated, again in locally-specific ways.

Reflexive restructuring: temp agencies and contingent labor
markets
Temporary employment has become a growth industry in its own right. Contingent
working arrangements are becoming increasingly commonplace in the United States, as
the number of temps, part-timers and contract workers continues to expand, while the
temporary help ‘industry’ has experienced explosive growth rates (Moberly, 1987;
Belous, 1989; Cappelli et al., 1997; Barker and Christensen, 1998). Indeed, one of the
distinctive features of the US economy is the extensive scale and scope of the business
services sector, a key element of which comprises a cluster of rapidly-growing ‘laborprocessing’ industries, such as headhunters, recruitment and placement services, labor
contractors and temp agencies (see Moore, 1965; Carnoy et al., 1997). As Osterman
(1999: 9) has explained:
Temporary help firms are playing a growing role in shaping the operation of the labor market.
They are becoming an important labor market institution. For example, they recruit and screen
regular employees for firms (hence performing a ‘labor exchange’ function), they staff the
human resources departments of some firms (they are an outsourcer), and they have linked up
with outplacement firms to help find jobs for laid-off workers (a function in principle performed
by the public employment and training system). Where all this will go is unclear.

Temp agencies are also beginning to bid successfully for government contracts in fields
like welfare administration, job placement and welfare-to-work. Functionally, it is clear
that temp agencies make possible forms of employment externalization and flexible labor
utilization which would not otherwise have been feasible, in the absence of a mature
‘infrastructure’ of labor-market intermediaries. Temp agencies have been key players in the
growth of what Abraham (1990) calls ‘market-mediated work arrangements’ in the US. As
Allen and Henry (1995) suggest, this phenomenon may be part of a generalized trend
toward the ‘formalization’ of contingent work as a quasi-permanent, institutionalized
feature of ‘flexible’ labor markets. Such employment relations, of course, are not without
their contradictions, even for employers (see Davis-Blake and Uzzi, 1993; Feldman et al.,
1994; Cooper, 1995; Nollen and Axel, 1998), one of the functions of the temp sector being
to manage the costs and contradictions of workforce contingency on employers’ behalf (see
Nollen and Axel, 1996; Peck and Theodore, 1998).
The US temp industry had its origins in Chicago in the 1920s (Moore, 1965). But this
industry, which many wrote off as anachronistic and marginal during the decades of
Fordist expansion after the second world war, has over the last 20 years reasserted itself
as one of the most dynamic, high-growth sectors (see Schodolski, 1996; Cappelli et al.,
1997; Kalleberg et al., 1997; Theodore and Mehta, 1999). Total temporary employment
in the US grew from virtual insignificance in 1973, when there were just 250,000
officially recorded temporary workers (or 0.3% of total employment), to 4.4 million in
1999 (or 3.4% of total employment) (GAO, 2000). Correspondingly, the workforce
mobilized by temporary help agencies, following very strong growth in the 1970s,
doubled in size between 1982 and 1989, only to double again between 1989 and 1997
(Gonos, 1998; Mishel et al., 1999). Reflecting the fact that this, in a very concrete sense,
is an economy of flows rather than stocks, temporary vacancies have come to account for
a significant share of new job openings, especially for low-income workers. Cappelli et
al. (1997) calculated that one in five of all new jobs created in the US since 1984 have
been temp jobs, while in the state of Illinois as much as one half of all vacancies in
manufacturing at the peak of the economic cycle in 1998 were for temporary workers
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(Chicago Tribune, 15 October 1998: B1). Early indications also suggest that temporary
employment is an important destination for former welfare recipients, following the
federal welfare reform of 1996, and that major agencies like Manpower Inc. are explicitly
targeting this new labor pool (see Sharpe and Quintanilla, 1997). In many low-income
neighborhoods, temp jobs have become the most important means of accessing the labor
market, as they have come to dominate local vacancy profiles. Here, it is hardly an
exaggeration to say that the labor market is the hiring hall.
The temp agency is both an orchestrator and a beneficiary of this explosion in
contingent employment, as ‘the only major institution that has found a way to make
money by finding people jobs’ (Sharpe and Quintanilla, 1997: A1). Manpower, the
world’s second largest temporary agency, processed some 560,000 W-2 tax forms in 1992,
making the Milwaukee-based company the biggest employer in the United States on some
counts. By 1996, Manpower was processing 800,000 W-2s annually, an increase of 43% in
just four years. According to the company’s then president, Mitchell Fromstein, ‘The U.S.
is going from just-in-time manufacturing to just-in-time employment. The employer tells
us, ‘I want them delivered exactly when I want them, as many as I need, and when I don’t
need them, I don’t want them here’ . . . Can I get people to work under these
circumstances? Yeah. We’re the ATMs of the job market’ (quoted in Castro, 1993: 44).
But the exceptionally strong corporate growth rates of national and multinational agencies
like Manpower, Kelly and Olsten are only part of the story. The burgeoning number of
small, locally-operated and often ‘back-street’ temp services is testimony to the dark side
of the industry. As the manager of one such locally-owned service, interviewed in Chicago
for this study, saw the situation, ‘The industry grows every day . . . a good day for us is
anything from 900 to 1,200 people. . . I don’t know the numbers [for the other agencies].
Everything’s kept in the dark in this industry. . . It’s getting more competitive. . . New
offices are popping up all over the place. I mean, it’s the way to go. Companies are saving
a lot of money and a lot of time by using us instead of hiring people’.
The expansion of the temp sector reflects its unique, superficially acyclical nature.
This is an industry that seems to thrive in good times and bad. More specifically, its yearon-year growth can be traced back to 1973, the decisive moment in America’s ‘Great UTurn’ toward income and job polarization (Harrison and Bluestone, 1988; Lapidus, 1990;
Gonos, 1998; Walker, 1999). During the 1980s, contingent work arrangements came to
epitomize the new and insecure labor market which was being created as a result of deunionization, attacks on the social wage, and the (re)emergence of quantitative flexibility
in the labor market. While in some respects this represented a more ‘deregulated’,
market-oriented labor regime, the presence of temp agencies also pointed to some of the
ways in which job markets have been re-institutionalized since the 1980s. These have
been buoyant times for the purveyors of contingent workers, because, in the words of
industry advocates Lewis and Molloy (1991: 2), ‘no strings attached’ workers can be
deployed, redeployed and unemployed in accordance with short-term business
requirements, managers having ‘discovered that using temporary help enables them to
operate with greater efficiency, minimize their obligation, and maintain greater control
over their budgets’. The Chicago agencies echoed these sentiments:
The temporary industry always prospers. During the time when the economy is good, everybody
needs people to work and they get temporaries. And then when the economy is down, and
people are laying off, downsizing and whatever, they always turn to the temporary industry
because they’ll lay off everybody and they’ll get temporaries. To my knowledge, there’s never
been a temporary service that has gone out of business. . . The temporary industry always thrives
(Owner-manager, small downtown agency).
Even in the bad times, we’re busy. . . The more that scare comes out — these are bad times,
these are bad times — people don’t want to hire then. So they turn to us. . . Bad times don’t
affect us that much (Manager, large multi-site agency).
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The temp industry is fiercely competitive, reflected in tight profit margins and
downward pressure on costs — in this case, primarily wages. It owes much of its viability
to low wages and job insecurity, so it perhaps should not be surprising that temp agencies
have thrived in the disorganizing and deregulating labor-market conditions of recent
decades. At the same time, the temp industry reflects, exploits and contributes to these
conditions. Temp agencies have flourished under the climate of labor-market polarization
and casualization, their very success serving to exaggerate and entrench these
phenomena. Insisting that his own company’s profit margins are perilously narrow,
Manpower’s Mitchell Fromstein presents himself as a servant of the market: ‘We are not
exploiting people. We are not setting the fees. The market is. We are matching people
with demands. What would our workers be doing without us? Unemployment lines?
Welfare? Suicide?’ (quoted in Castro, 1993: 46).
The growth of day-labor contracting, and of contingent work in general, has come
about as firms seek to reduce factor input costs and increase production flexibility. But
temp agencies are more than passive beneficiaries of these trends in industrial
(re)organization. They actively shape the growth in contingent labor through their role
in labor-market intermediation, by selling employers the cost-cutting and laborcontrolling virtues of workforce flexibility while mobilizing contingent workers and
brokering connections to employers. According to Bruce Steinberg of the National
Association of Temporary Staffing Services, the growth of temporary employment
represents a logical response to the threat of low-wage competition from abroad: ‘The
temps, in effect, are earning wages that are competitive with worker pay in other
countries’, warning that unless employers find a way to access this labor force, ‘a
significant part of manufacturing might be transferred outside our borders’ (quoted in
New York Times, 6 July 1993). For one reason or another, the pressures on firms to move
offshore are routinely exaggerated, particularly given the scope for remaking employment
relations and reducing the social wage in situ through strategies like temping. In 1999,
29.8% of agency temps had an annual family income of less than $15,000 (compared to
7.7% of ‘standard’ full-time workers), while 70% of agency temps had no health
insurance (compared to 44% of ‘standard’ full-time workers) (GAO, 2000).
Within local labor markets, temp agencies shape the geographies of contingent work
by providing a fragile bridge between the under-employed labor pools of inner-city areas
and the tight job markets of the suburbs. As Lewis and Molloy (1991: 29) explain, temp
agencies are ‘[a]cutely aware of the on-going labor shortage’ in the edge cities, and in
response the ‘temporary help industry has tapped into segments of the population which
might otherwise not be working’. Along with other contingent-work strategies such as
homeworking, temping enables suburban firms to reach deep into urban labor pools,
accessing labor supplies which are difficult to mobilize using ‘conventional’ labor-market
channels (see Sassen, 1998). The case of temp working therefore exposes some of the
highly complex and variegated ways in which local labor markets are being restructured
and reregulated (see Hanson and Pratt, 1995; Peck, 1996). More generally, temp agencies
must be considered among the key institutional agents that make contingent labor markets
what they are, that make them happen.
In fact, there is a dialectical relationship between temp work regimes and the wider
labor markets in which they are embedded, as well as between the strategies of the temp
agencies and those of their corporate clients. So the pressure on corporations to cut costs,
to become more flexible and to minimize payrolls is reflected in the proliferation of
temporary servicing, while, at the same time, the sales teams of the temp agencies
actively pursue new business opportunities by selling the cost-reducing, flexibilityenhancing and labor-controlling virtues of temporary employment to client firms. These
have been key factors behind the explosion of low-skilled temping in the light-industrial
sector, which is both the fastest-growing and poorest-paying segment of the industry
(Carre´, 1992; Houseman, 1997). As the manager of one such agency put it:
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If there’s a company with an assembly line that uses day-to-day people, odds are they’re using
temps or they’re going to use temps. If they haven’t heard about them, they’re crazy, because
the money they save is astronomical. . . They have to pay somebody $8–9 an hour, for instance,
where they can pay us $6.50 and everything’s out of their hands. . . And we’re flexible. They can
call us and they can have an order for 20 people in the morning and all of a sudden a shipment
comes in and they need 20 more, they can call us any time of the day and we’ll get 20 people
out to them. It’s that easy. Imagine if they were trying to call 20 people and trying to hire them
that day. It would never happen. It wouldn’t be possible (Manager, large inner-city labor
contractor).

So the very presence of agencies, with their ready supply of labor for sale by the hour,
makes forms of contingent working feasible (if not to say attractive) which otherwise
would be practically unattainable for employers. Thus, the temp industry’s ‘rogue traders’
— most often the source of its image problems (Bronstein, 1991) — feed as well as feed
off job-market polarization, in so doing dragging down conditions at the very bottom of
the labor market. This explains the burgeoning demand for day-laborers, now often
supplied on a no-questions-asked basis, for routine manual work in factories and
warehouses in cities like Chicago (Parker, 1994; Oehlsen, 1997). The basic purpose of
these deeply commodified employment relations is delivering the requisite amount of
labor — warm bodies in the industry vernacular — to the client, whose labor needs can
then be recalibrated on a daily or even hourly basis. What used to be regarded as ‘deadend’ jobs — packaging, loading, working the assembly line — are apparently now not
even that; in Chicago, much of this work has been put out to contract to one of the scores
of local temp agencies hungry for the business.
While perhaps the most notable feature of Chicago’s temp industry at the present
time is this regressive turn (back) to day-labor contracting, illustrated by the proliferation
of hiring halls along the city’s low-rent commercial strips, it is also important to
recognize that this is a highly variegated industry (Kalleberg et al., 1997). In many
respects, the Midwest exhibits this more clearly than other regions because, as the
birthplace of the temp industry, it has retained a pre-eminent role in the development of
industry practices and conventions. Both the leading and the bleeding edges of change are
apparent in Chicago. The back-street hiring halls are ‘restructuring down’ into the lowest
echelons of the labor market, servicing the process of labor flexibility in the wider
economy by mobilizing, distributing and managing day laborers. Employment relations in
this segment of the industry are remade on a daily basis. Yet a quite different set of
developments is underway among the leading firms in the industry, which are
increasingly being drawn into long-term relationships with corporate clients for the
‘insourcing’ of certain work functions. The corporatized echelons of the industry have
been growing by ‘restructuring upwards’ into more embedded and contractualized
relationships with big business clients. The shift to insourcing and the emergence of new
sources of contingent demand for highly-skilled, specialist workers have drawn the larger
agencies in the temp industry into longer-term, human resource-based functions. These
agencies are doing far more than delivering warm bodies; they are servicing demands for
qualitative flexibility — involving, for example, the rebundling of skills and the
reorganization of employment functions — as well as the quantitative or numerical
flexibility on which the industry is premised (see Atkinson, 1987; Osterman, 1999).
Restructuring is driving a process of differentiation and segmentation in the temp
industry and in its labor markets (see Peck and Theodore, 1998). While the temporary
staffing industry has always been more differentiated than its stereotypical image
suggests, there is strong evidence at the present time that the industry is polarizing in
organizational, labor-market and spatial terms (Table 1). On the one hand, the demand
for minimally-processed warm bodies is rising: as one hiring hall manager put it, clients
are just ‘looking for a warm body that can show up for work’. On the other, though,
major corporate clients are seeking to contract out job functions, departments and
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Table 1
sector

479

Indicative characteristics of ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ restructuring paths in the temp
Restructuring down

Restructuring up

Labor supply
Appropriation

•

•

Targeting of specialized occupational
niches

Recruitment

•
•

•
•

Formal; targeted advertising
Active, costly and extra-local

Screening

•

•

Selection

•
•

In-depth assessment of skills and
aptitudes
Based on achieved criteria
Matching: formal, tacit and
organizational skills
Achieving a ‘fit’ with corporate
culture
Pursuit of qualitative criteria
Personalized systems ensure
‘appropriateness’ for placement

•
Allocation

•
•

Reallocation

•

Attachment

•

Labor demand
Strategy

•

Procurement

•
•
•

Induction
Job design

•
•

Supervision

•

‘Product’
Payment system

•
•
•

Geographic
tendencies

•

Identification and targeting of
appropriate, under-employed,
inner-urban labor pools
Informal, word-of-mouth methods
Passive, low cost and highly
localized
Perfunctory, though avoidance of
‘body slamming’ where possible
Based on ascriptive criteria
Placing ‘warm bodies’
‘Hardening’ of employers’
recruitment criteria
Pursuit of quantitative criteria
Impersonal systems: workers as
‘orders’, transportation as
‘delivery’
Rewarding ‘reliability’: measured
in terms of attendance and
compliance
Intensification of external market
disciplines (commodification of
daily work routines)

Numerical flexibility in
occupations with few formal skill
requirements
Non contractual
Purchases in units of labor time
(daily or hourly)
Minimal specification of skills
capabilities
Minimalist; directive
Deskilled; detailed subdivision of
tasks; repetitive with little worker
discretion
Direct control; close task and
output monitoring; crude
categorical evaluations
Available labor
Hourly; minimum wage
Limited bonus systems to
encourage ‘reliability’
Gravitation toward source of labor
supply, in order to secure elastic,
localized labor pool

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•
•
•
•
•

Rewarding ‘reliability’: measured in
terms of functional job requirements

•

Quasi-internalization of the labor
force (by agency/occupational
specialization rather than by
‘employer’)

•

Functional flexibility in specialized
occupations

•
•
•

Contractualized
Planned/regularized where possible
Close matching of task requirements
and worker attributes/skills

•
•

Non-standardized; iterative
Integrated; firm-specific rebundling
of tasks; requirement for worker
discretion
Presumption of worker autonomy;
evaluation and job development
through negotiation
Qualified labor
Project-based
Market rates (sometimes premium)
Bonus and loyalty systems

•
•
•
•
•
•

Gravitation toward source of labor
demand, in order to facilitate
reflexive client relationships

 480
Table 2

Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore
Changing location of temporary help services, City of Chicago 1985–98

Number of agencies
Loop/CBD
Neighborhoods
Total

1985

1999

Change 1985–99

65
50
115

118
99
217

77%
98%
89%

Sources: Chicago Consumer Yellow Pages and Chicago Business to Business Yellow Pages.

sometimes entire tiers of employment on a quasi-permanent basis to agencies, which
tailor their services to corporate imperatives and cultures: as a manager of a major temp
chain explained it, ‘We still have people who say that [‘We want 50 warm bodies’], but
now we say how warm?’. The priority for agencies operating at the top of the market —
in contrast to those at the bottom — is not the daily mobilization of a suitably flexible
labor supply, but the effective servicing of corporate clients, calling for iterative,
reflexive relationships between agency and client. This may lead to the spatial clustering
of major agencies and their corporate clients, though this is certainly not a necessity, at
least as long as effective communication systems are in place (to monitor performance
and to facilitate any direct interventions which might be required). Some of the agencies
provide an ‘on-site manager’ with larger (or difficult-to-manage) orders, which in some
ways represents a form of co-location. In fact, it is also increasingly common for major
agencies to establish branches in key suburban growth centers, in addition to their
traditional downtown locations. In the location and presentation of their branch
operations, these agencies do everything they can to distance themselves from the
somewhat sleazy image of the lower reaches of the industry. The major agencies are
anxious to locate themselves in the same organizational, social and business milieux as
their corporate clients. Such functional and locational considerations tend to override the
daily imperatives of labor mobilization and cost minimization, the preoccupations of the
back-street agencies.
Both these trajectories of restructuring — downward and upward — are strongly
evident in Chicago’s temp sector (Peck and Theodore, 1998). In 1999, on the narrowest
definition of temp agencies in the Yellow Pages — ‘temporary help services’ — there
were some 217 agencies listed in the City of Chicago, an increase of 89% since 1985.5
Along with Los Angeles, Chicago represents the largest temp market in the United States,
officially recorded employment in the temp agency sector having more than doubled here
during the 1990s. As Table 2 reveals, although the number of agencies in the central
business district has increased considerably, the highest growth rate has occurred in the
neighborhoods, where the number of agencies has doubled since 1985. It is in these innercity areas that the day-labor business is booming and where unregulated ‘labor corners’
are also springing up. Given the low barriers to entry in the temp industry (many agencies
getting started with just a single order), the number of small, independent operators is
high and growing. Some of the more successful agencies have formed local chains, with
offices located in several low-income neighborhoods. Such is the success of some of these
operations, a select number have attracted the interest of national chains (for example,
Handy Andy, a local chain, was recently taken over by Olsten Services, itself later bought
by Adecco). So, while some agencies are clearly rather marginal operations — whose
viability is essentially based on a favorable combination of low capital outlays and large
5 On the wider count of employment agencies, which includes employee leasing and employment
contracting, there were 427 listings in the 1999 Yellow Pages. Classification changes mean that it is no
longer possible to trace the growth of this widely defined group of temp agencies over time. On a broader
definition used until the mid-1990s, however, the number of agencies grew by 70% between 1985 and
1995, to over 300 (Peck and Theodore, 1998).
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cash flows — many of the larger organizations are yielding relatively dependable profits.
This reflects the fact that the ‘core business’ in Chicago’s contingent economy is now a
substantial one, despite its daily uncertainties and seasonal fluctuations.
We estimate that, at its seasonal peak, the industry currently employs more than
100,000 workers in the city of Chicago each day. There is little systemic evidence on the
sectoral breakdown of the workforce, although most local surveys reveal a fairly even
split between manufacturing and service employment (see US Department of Labor,
1993). The most important occupations for temporary employment in Chicago are, in the
manufacturing sector, freight, stock and materials handlers, laborers, and machine
operators, assemblers and inspectors; and in services, data-entry keyers, general office
clerks and typists. Nationally, minority workers are heavily concentrated in temporary
work, a pattern that is replicated in Chicago. Here, though, Latinos comprise a
particularly large share of contingent employment in general and temp work in particular
(Theodore, 1995). Despite their chronic under-employment, African-American residents
of inner-city Chicago do not seem to be gaining significant access to the expanding
contingent-labor market. An important factor behind the racialized structure of the city’s
contingent labor market is the modus operandi of the temp agencies, to which we now
turn our attention.

Extracting surplus: the political economy of the hiring hall
The core business of the temp sector is, of course, processing labor, but this itself is a
complex and variegated task. The temp industry’s employees are, at the same time, its
major cost, its key competitive asset and its basic product. Agencies tend to define
themselves by the niche of the labor market they service, sometimes expressed as a rate of
pay, sometimes in terms of the qualities and skills of the workers on their books. In the
lower reaches of the industry, our focus in the remainder of the article, large numbers of
agencies operate at (or in some cases below) the minimum wage level, functioning in the
context of fierce price (and wage) competition and dealing with business clients whose
main concern is the hourly billing rate. It is not unknown for contracts to be switched
between agencies mid-shift, even for rival agencies to poach an entire work assignment,
rehiring the workers onto their own books, by undercutting the billing rate at a work-site.
The threat of poaching, coupled with widely-fluctuating daily order sizes and profound
downward pressure on costs, contributes to the marginal, shady character of this part of
the industry. The pejorative connotations of the term ‘back-street operator’ are quite
fitting in this context, just as its geographical signifiers are quite appropriate. The dingy
and vaguely threatening appearance of many hiring halls is characteristic of an industry
which shuns all forms of scrutiny (Oehlsen, 1997). In an exception to prove the rule, one
of the large contractors interviewed for this study made much of the open windows of his
hiring hall, a signifier he claimed of a reputable operation:
We’re the only ones with open windows [in this neighborhood]. When we opened it up a couple
of the owners called and said we’re crazy for leaving the windows open, because [other
agencies] actually come and steal people from you if they see you’ve got a lot of people. If
they’re short, they actually come and steal people. . . They’ll just come by with a van and tell
them they’ve got work. It’s absolutely cut-throat. You have to be in it for a while to believe it
(Manager, large labor contractor).

Although some of the day-labor contractors in Chicago are able to regularize their
orders to a certain extent through a strategy of expansion, for many — perhaps the
majority — remaining small, and effectively in the shadows, is the only viable option. In
this way, temp agency business strategies have clear labor-market analogs, as the
manager of a large inner-city hiring hall explained:
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We’ve been able to grow because we check ourselves, because we audit ourselves and take care
of it. A lot of these places don’t want to grow. They want to stay small. If you go down the road
you’ll see some of the other places. They want to stay small so they’ll be undetected, so to
speak. . . A lot of them pay cash, you know, it’s like the old days. . . These places. . . you
wouldn’t even dare go in there.

In contrast to the national and multinational temp chains, whose offices tend to echo the
look and feel of their corporate clients — down to the potted plants, carpets and crisply
uniformed staff — the aesthetics of the hiring hall, rather like its economics, are strictly
utilitarian. This is a ‘no frills’ business. The key consideration for the business clients of
the hiring halls is that the correct number of workers are delivered for each shift, at the
lowest possible price. There are virtually no formal contracts between agencies and
clients. Just like the fragile employment relationship between the temp and the agency,
verbal agreements hold only until the client decides to terminate (or revise) them, which
might be tomorrow or in six months’ time. As a manager in one of the largest multi-site
agencies emphasized, ‘There are very few contracts. Everything’s verbal. Really’. This is
partly accounted for by the sheer velocity and short-term nature of the industry, but also
reflects the daily realities of beggar-thy-neighbor competition. As another manager
described it, ‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. There’s a lot of agencies [that] undercut
on price’ (Small inner-city hiring and placement service).
But if billing rates provide the source of the industry’s short-term dynamic, agencies
also know that to retain a contract they have to provide more. Given the opportunity,
agencies will act swiftly to rectify problems at the worksite, to remove ‘difficult’ workers,
or to renegotiate the billing rate. It is also common industry practice, where possible, to
retain the same workers on a placement for as long as possible, in order to minimize
clients’ induction and training costs while raising productivity. In these ways, the more
successful agencies are able to establish a competitive edge, albeit within the same tight
cost parameters. Providing what employers want — a ready supply of workers who are
‘willing to work’ — at the lowest possible billing rate is the basic rationale of the daylabor contractor.
We’ll just send an order there. . . Nobody does contracts, because this is such a competitive
industry. Like for instance we’ll lose a contract because we’re at a rate of say $6 an hour,
someone goes in at $5.50, and it’s screw [agency A] we’ll use [agency B] because they’re 50
cents lower that day. They won’t even tell you half the time, they just say we don’t need you any
more (Manager, large labor contractor).

The more reputable agencies that service the minimum-wage market for day-laborers,
however much they disparage the back-street operators, appreciate that very often it is the
lowest bidder who dictates the terms of competition. Value-adding strategies, such as
computer systems that reallocate workers to the same clients automatically and provide
bonuses for ‘reliability’, or attempts to pitch wages slightly above the market/minimum
rate in order to retain ‘quality’ temps, are therefore strictly circumscribed by market
conditions. These are costs that many agencies decide they cannot carry.
People will say to you, I don’t want to pay that bill rate. I have x-y-z [agency] over here that’s
going to give me that same person, . . . and I’m only going to have to pay $6 for that person.
Well then fine. . . You are going to get the people who say, send me a body, and if it’s not the
lowest price, I’m going to the lowest price person. I say well then go, because we offer a lot
more. . . And then how many of them are employing people, I hate to say this, you know, who
shouldn’t be employed. That’s a big issue on the South Side of Chicago. Not with us (Manager,
large multi-site agency).

While these agencies may represent themselves as victims of the market, they
recognize also that uncertainty and unpredictability is inscribed in the very structure of
the industry which is predicated on cutting costs and servicing (daily and seasonal)
fluctuations in labor requirements. The structure and dynamics of the industry therefore
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reflect its contingent relationship with the wider ‘mainstream’ economy. As one agency
manager explained of her manufacturing-industry clients, ‘There’s always downtime,
always. But now when there’s downtime, they don’t have to pay anything. So we don’t
need any temps next week, OK?’
Chronic instability and tight margins reflect the ‘natural state’ of this segment of the
industry. For ‘mid-market’ agencies, then, there are few alternatives but to absorb the
costs of business fluctuations and systemically low billing rates. At one level, of course, it
is their rationale to act as a ‘buffer’ for the wider economy (see Abraham, 1990; Cappelli
et al., 1997), though they will adopt what strategies they can to minimize, spread or defer
risks where this is feasible. The chain operations are able to turn to a network of local
offices to cover peak demands, using vans to transport workers across the city in order to
meet an unexpectedly large order. Others have informal agreements with neighboring
agencies, reciprocal arrangements to act as ‘back-up’ if an office is overstretched on a
particular day. This strategy can only be used sparingly, however, as it exposes agencies
to the risk of subcontractors poaching either the workers or the client, or both: ‘The
problem with subcontracting is they’re going to call [the client] the next day and say
we’re getting people there, why can’t we have all the business? It’s that competitive’
(Manager, large day-labor contractor).
While there is some use of interorganizational strategies for spreading risk, these are
truncated by the unregulated nature of competition in the industry. By implication, the
most common strategy for dealing with risk — and a defining characteristic of the
industry — is to pass it on to the workforce (see Mangum et al., 1985; Gottfried, 1992;
Sparke, 1994). Fluctuations in orders for agencies are consequently translated into
employment and income insecurity for their workers. Although some workers may expect
to return to the same placement when they show up at the agency at 5 or 6 o’clock each
morning, none can be certain of this. A reduced or canceled order for the agency —
unless there has been fortuitous compensatory expansion elsewhere — will mean no work
and no wages for a group of workers that day. This form of risk externalization also
serves as a crudely effective labor control strategy — a critical prerequisite for the
extraction of surplus value under these straitened conditions — as the ever-present threat
of disposability induces temps to intensify their own labor (Gottfried, 1991).
This is not a matter of concern for the agencies as such. Rather, their problem is to
ensure that they are in a position to service increased orders. Given that this is the means
by which agencies grow and become more profitable, an essential component of their
overall business strategy is to ensure that there is sufficient slack in the (local) labor
supply to satisfy their peak needs. Along with the desire for low-rent premises, this tends
to draw day-labor contractors into the poorest and most under-employed inner-city
neighborhoods.
We haven’t needed to access any other offices [for very large orders] because in this
neighborhood there’s an abundance of people. If we go up by say 150 people in a day, we’ll
make phone calls, we pass out fliers. We may be short maybe 10–15 people now and again. But
it’s never really been a problem. If we’re prepared for it, we can access the people immediately
(Manager, large labor contractor).

For the most part, hiring halls draw on a highly localized labor supply, often stretching no
more than a few blocks. In a typical case, a manager of a multi-site labor contractor
estimated that 80% of her workforce lived in the surrounding five-block area. Another
explained, ‘The only reason we’re here is for the people. Obviously, this is not the nicest
neighborhood. That’s the only reason we’re in this neighborhood — to access the people’
(Manager, large labor contractor).
Agencies seek to engineer a situation in which there is a persistent excess local labor
supply, such that they are positioned to exploit the maximum degree of quantitative
flexibility in the labor market. Yet the agglomeration of day-labor contractors in areas
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proximate to their preferred labor supplies has not afforded workers greater bargaining
power that might result in higher wages. The temp industry has been able to counteract
potential wage-increasing tendencies arising from agglomeration by fostering contingency and exploiting the volatility of its employment relations. On the supply side,
agencies have converged on neighborhoods experiencing deep structural under-employment and widespread economic insecurity. The presence of agencies in such
neighborhoods has served to draw large numbers of workers into the day-labor workforce
as it presents the only expanding employment option available. A high level of
competition between workers is thereby maintained by the literal and metaphorical
‘crowding’ of temp labor markets. In the context of the hiring hall labor market,
competition is direct and even physical: highly substitutable workers stand shoulder to
shoulder each morning waiting for work assignments. Competition within the labor
supply — arising out of economic necessity — helps agencies retain a hold on their
privileged position in the labor market, which allows them to dictate wage levels to their
workers. Demand-side practices of marketing the cost-cutting advantages of labor
contingency, and the (instantaneous) acquiescence to employers’ demands by temp
agencies, reinforce the principal supply-side strategies that have both fueled the growth of
the temp industry and served to hold down wage rates.

Delivering workers: geographies of labor contingency
The spatial disjuncture between the inner-city sites of the hiring halls and their business
clients in the suburbs points to the fact that the temp agencies’ brokerage role is partly a
practical, transportational one. Agencies often speak of ‘shipping workers’ out to the job
sites in the suburbs, underlining the commodified nature of temp employee relations. Of
course, clients only pay ‘on delivery’, so there is an inordinate concern — in industry
conventions and daily business practice — with the efficient transportation of workers out
to the suburbs. In industry lore, which the more candid interviewees were more than
happy to share, the temp labor force is by inclination feckless, shifty and unreliable, a
naturalized state which justifies — in the eyes of managers — authoritarian and
impersonal systems of management. When the ‘orders’ are dispatched, workers are
loaded unceremoniously into vans, buses or the cars of fellow workers and transported to
the job sites. Ostensibly as an incentive to travel directly to their destination, workers are
paid from the time they arrive on site.
Maybe we send people here and one guy decides to go eat breakfast instead of go to work. . . So
we’ve got to send another person. Anything you can imagine happens. It all happens. Sometimes I
think I’m like a kindergarten teacher because you’ve got to take care of these people. They’ve
worked before, but they’ve only worked where you’ve got to tell them exactly what to do and
you’ve got to tell them how to get from point A to point B (Manager, large labor contractor).
With general labor and those kinds of things, we have to transport the people, because from
point A to point B a million things happen. We send ten and by the time they get to point B
there’s only three. So it’s best for us to put them all on one van and make sure they all get there
(Manager #1, multi-site labor contractor).

To a substantial degree, the viability of inner-city labor-contractors is predicated on
the spatial mismatch between the buoyant demand for contingent labor in the outer
suburbs and the over-supply of workers prepared (or induced) to accept such work in the
inner-city neighborhoods. As one hiring hall manager put it, ‘There are a lot of jobs in the
suburbs. . . We just get them out there’. Another explained it in terms of relative labor
costs: ‘If they’re hiring people in the suburbs, they’ve got to pay $8–9 an hour for work
that these people can do for $4.25’ [minimum wage at the time of interview]. Suburban
businesses are consequently able to tap into the low-cost labor reserves of inner-city
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neighborhoods, dispensing at the same time with much of the cost of recruitment and
management.
We’re in the city, so it’s easier for us to get the employees in [than in the suburbs]. They’ll work
for minimum wage, whereas in the suburbs they can go to McDonald’s and make $4.50–5.50.
With our billing rates we can’t match that. . . All of our offices are located in areas where they’re
either at poverty or very low income level. . . Most of the employers we have here are located in
Elk Grove [Village], Bensenville [two of the fastest-growing suburban employment centers]. I
would say 90% of our business comes out of there (Manager #1, multi-site labor contractor).
This is the South Side of Chicago. They’re just dying for workers [on the North Side]. They’re
placing $100 ads in the papers, but we don’t have to do that on the South Side because there’s a
lot of people out of work. . . And so how we recruit here is word of mouth mainly. . . But up
north, no, that doesn’t happen so much, because how many workers who are out of a job could
afford to live in some of the areas? They really can’t. You really can’t live in Skokie [middleclass suburb] if you’re not working. But you possibly could live on the South Side (Manager,
large multi-site agency).

From the perspective of the suburban business client, the wage-cost of labor is
reduced virtually to subsistence levels, plus a small servicing charge, while the
corresponding social and managerial costs are deferred to the temp agencies. This allows
employers to access the lowest-wage labor pools in the city in a relatively risk-free
fashion. But what for employers are issues of cost minimization are for low-wage workers
matters of daily subsistence. As the manager of a hiring hall in one of Chicago’s poorest
neighborhoods — where there were no real alternatives to minimum-wage jobs —
explained, ‘$4.25 they can barely live off. Around here they can, but they’re struggling
everyday. They don’t go out [to work] one day, they don’t eat that day. That’s how it is’.
Suburban employers gain access to this labor supply, moreover, under conditions of
maximum flexibility and minimum commitment. Both agencies and the temp workers
themselves are paid only for work satisfactorily completed, allowing employers to tailor
the purchase of labor even to the most short-term fluctuations in demand. Employers also
evade the costs of absenteeism, uncooperative behavior, vacation and sick pay, workers’
compensation insurance and unemployment benefits. Under these employment relations,
workers who have accidents, fall ill or argue with the supervisor do not have the
opportunity to become a problem or an expense for management, but are simply not
rehired tomorrow. A phonecall to the agency is all that it takes. It is difficult in many
ways to conceive of a more contingent set of employment relations. Employers are able to
reap the advantages of almost complete control of this segment of their workforce:
Companies basically use us to control their labor force. . . The one weakness in our service is
that we are dealing with human beings. We can do a great job of getting them here and sending
them to the company, but by the time they get from here to there, you know they’re human, they
can do whatever they want (Manager, large labor contractor).
We are a human resources company. They just call us. They need 100 people, 150 people one
day, which happens all the time, the next day they need 60. They just tell us they need 60. They
don’t have to go through the hassle of firing all these people, and paying unemployment
[insurance] and going through all that process, they just say 60 people and that’s what they get.
So they get 60 people at their door that are ready to work. The next day they need 150, we bring
150 (Supervisor, large hiring hall).

The use of temp agencies allows employers to take advantage of a high-discipline
work regime in a context in which, first, the mobilization and management of workers is
contracted out to the temp agencies and, second, the costs of labor reproduction are
evaded by both agencies and business clients. While business clients must supervise
temps on the shopfloor, labor problems are minimized by the wider regime of control that
envelops the temp labor process. For the most part, temp workers have no union
representation, no effective means of redress against their placement employer and no
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basis on which to renegotiate the terms of work. They are located within a deliberately
ambiguous ‘triangular’ employment relationship (worker/agency/placement employer)
within which most routine employment rights are effectively denied (or rendered
practically inoperable), a deregulated niche in the US labor market which the temp
agencies’ representative organizations have fought vigorously to defend and expand
(Gottfried, 1992; Gonos, 1998). Temps’ contingent relations of employment render them
absolutely dependent on the employer. A belligerent or workshy temp is likely to be
removed from the job site, and certainly will not be returned the following day. As one
interviewee explained it, there are occasions when a temp will ‘screw up your account.
That person you sent out there and she didn’t have alcohol on her breath, but she had a
bottle in her bag. That pisses you off’ (Manager #2, multi-site labor contractor). Temp
agencies, of course, have no reason to tolerate such behavior, as it may cost them a day’s
fee or even the account. Highly substitutable, these workers are not placed again.
In a typical work allocation system, employers assess each worker daily, usually on a
three-point scale ranging from ‘good’ through ‘acceptable’ to ‘no return’ (see Peck and
Theodore, 1998). Agencies prioritize ‘good’ workers in their allocation systems — many
of which are computerized — calling on these first in the next day’s work assignments.
This represents an extremely high-discipline labor control regime, in which failure to
comply with managerial authority leads, in effect, to immediate exclusion from work. It
also amounts to a form of seniority-based placement system, albeit one that is recalibrated
daily: ‘We just go by seniority . . . mostly we just go by the hours. We figure they’ve been
there long enough and haven’t screwed up too much’ (Manager, large labor contractor).
This means that even in this highly unstable context, some workers are able to work quite
steadily. So, the labor allocation systems of the agencies are organized to maximize
continuity of employment, although there can be no guarantees that a worker will present
her/himself in the office tomorrow. Work assignments are organized in this way, not as a
concession to temp workers, but because this is what employers demand: they want a
reliably contingent labor supply.
Normally, clients like to have the same people back every day (Supervisor, large hiring hall).
One of our biggest problems is tackling [the return of workers] every day. Because we’re a
temporary agency, people they get up one morning and decide, well, I don’t want to go to work
today . . . they don’t have that, I have to go to work today. They just decide whenever they want
to (Manager #1, multi-site labor contractor).

Daily hiring decisions are mostly left to the ‘discretion’ of the agency, which of course
has a financial incentive to anticipate and satisfy the ‘needs’ of the client. Stable workers
are rewarded, while ‘problem cases’ soon find themselves without work. Because formal
skill requirements are generally very low, these decisions have little to do with
conventional notions of ‘human capital’. An ability to cope with what is often physically
arduous and mind-numbingly tedious work therefore becomes another signifier for
‘quality’. And of course, the worker must also be available tomorrow.
You’d think that quality doesn’t mean much because it’s completely unskilled labor. However,
if you were to go there and actually sit on an assembly line for eight hours and do the same thing
all day long, you have to be able to do that. It takes a certain person to do that. A lot of people,
after four or five hours, they’re talking and screwing around. They can’t concentrate that long.
You know, you’re taking this pipe or something and putting it here, or packaging this candy or
something, and doing that for eight hours straight. They want people who are going to sit there
all day long and do that. Not talk, not give them a problem. And they’re going to show up the
next day, and the next day and the next day and the next day. That’s basically what they want in
a quality person (Manager, large labor contractor).
[Clients] trust your judgment. They know that you know what they want. . . New clients
sometimes explain to me what they want. . . Anybody can do [those] skills once you show them
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what to do. When you ask for specific types of people, I might send someone out there who,
OK, he reads and writes English . . . [but is] over-qualified, not a good match. And they say that
guy didn’t work out, so I say why don’t you let me send you somebody because I know that
[worker] over here, he knows numbers, not necessarily letters, but he knows numbers, and that’s
OK. . . When you’ve done this for a long time you kind of get a feel. . . Sometimes people just
don’t click. [By using a temporary agency, employers] can find someone that they can work
with. A lot of times it happens the first time, sometimes one person just does not fit in, and
they’ll call and say you can send the others back but can you replace so-and-so. They have that
option. And as their work fluctuates, they can drop off or add on (Manager #2, multi-site labor
contractor).

As the manager of a hiring hall explained, because most of the placements are ‘just general
assembly’, and because in his operation around 350 workers have to be processed and
dispatched in the space of an hour in the early morning shift, opportunities for screening
were limited. The most stable workers would be automatically reallocated to the same
placement, but for the highly substitutable remainder: ‘We look at the guy. We try not to
send out vagrants or drunks or anything, but every now and again they get out obviously,
they slip by. . . We screen them but, you know, some slide by every now and then’.
Yet, while the screening process is in many ways superficial, its effects most
certainly are not. Several studies have revealed that levels of discrimination and
segregation, by both race and gender, are markedly higher within the temp workforce than
in the workforce as a whole (Colastosti, 1992; Ryan and Schmit, 1996; Kalleberg et al.,
1997; Spalter-Roth and Hartmann, 1998).6 The Chicago labor market, moreover, is
known to be especially deeply race-structured (see Neckerman and Kirschenman, 1991;
Chicago Urban League, 1994; Wilson, 1996; Abu-Lughod, 1999). The modus operandi of
the temp industry is such that patterns of discrimination and segregation are not simply
reproduced but often exaggerated. At root, agencies have a financial incentive to comply
with employers’ (stated, implicit or anticipated) demands, whatever these may be.
Ignoring employers’ racial or gender preferences may be tantamount to jeopardizing an
order. Prejudice and discrimination consequently become part of the unchallenged, takenfor-granted environment in which agencies operate. Most agencies are attuned to the
implicit gender and race codes that are associated with different neighborhoods,
occupations and employers. Working within these parameters becomes a routine aspect of
their wider imperative to accurately read and service ‘the market’. Few of the agencies
interviewed made any effort to conceal this. Occasionally, there were attempts to
rationalize patterns of segregation, but more often than not these were accepted as given.
Sometimes we have orders for all men. And sometimes we just have orders for women. That
varies a lot. . . The clients will specify what they want. And there are clients who will just say,
whatever. It doesn’t matter to them (Manager #1, multi-site labor contractor).
In bindery work, assembly work, things like that, women’s hands seem to move a little faster.
Men bore easily with that type of work because there’s no, it’s not a challenge. . . [Employers]
will ask for women . . . specifically because of the type of work it is. We have tried sending men,
because we don’t have enough ladies . . . but for some reason, I guess because men’s hands are
larger, or something like that, they just cannot stuff those envelopes as quickly or do the bindery
work as quickly. And they don’t pay as much attention to detail as women do. So, for instance,
we have a client that does binders and the edges have to be exactly smooth. Women will take
the time [while] men will say oh screw it. And that’s because boredom sets in. They want
something a little more strenuous, to kind of flex their muscles (Manager #2, multi-site labor
contractor).
6 In 1997, the median weekly wage for agency temps was 64.5% of that for full-time workers in ‘standard’
jobs, but the comparable figures for women and Hispanic workers in the temp sector were even lower, at
59.8% and 55.0% respectively (see Cohany, 1998).
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In terms of the racial stereotyping of jobs, most agencies acknowledged, and operated
within, a distinctive hierarchy of labor-market positions. Some agencies implicitly
defined their ‘market niche’ in terms of the prevailing ethnic mix of their workforce.
Given the marked racial segregation of Chicago’s housing market, the location of an
agency was often enough to trigger racial/ethnic signifiers. Many agencies were explicitly
targeting Latino workers, both in their daily work allocation systems and, more
fundamentally, in their location decisions. In contrast, virtually none of the agencies were
located in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, despite the manifest
availability of workers in these areas. Employers placing an order with an agency in a
predominantly Latino area would know what to expect and, indeed, some agencies would
blithely confirm that they rarely drew workers from across local ‘race lines’, such as
major streets or train lines known to divide one ethnic community from another. Through
such forms of geographical shorthand, temp agencies perform a crude sorting function in
the Chicago labor market, in effect doing the discrimination on behalf of their clients.
[The neighborhood] I’d say is about 80% Hispanic. It’s all lower income. A lot of them, I’d
probably say most of the neighborhood, works through us. If not, they’re working for minimum
wage somewhere else. Twenty percent is probably African American (Manager, inner-city
hiring hall).

Latino neighborhoods trigger a range of employment-related signifiers for employers:
they are perceived as locations of cheap, hard-working, and often undocumented workers.
The regulatory ambiguity around the use of agency labor allows employers to insulate
themselves from the potential legal costs of employing undocumented workers, a status
commonly elided with all Latino workers in such neighborhoods. The responsibility for
checking the documentation of workers is again displaced from the employer to the
agency. As a hiring hall manager explained, ‘We take documentation, if they have it.
When they come in they have to fill an application and give us the proper ID . . . and it’s
complete as far as we know. We’re in charge, that’s why [clients] use us. They pass it on
to us and we’re responsible for it’.
I would say 75% of the people out of this office are Hispanic. Why? Because people for some
reason think they are better workers . . . but with any ethnic group you have someone that’s
always screwing it up. We have some clients that prefer Hispanics, request Hispanic people, and
if you send people from other nationalities to work there, sometimes you run into problems, the
main problem being that the majority of people who work there are Hispanic and they speak
Hispanic [sic], so other people don’t understand what’s going on . . . it’s hard to communicate
(Manager #2, multi-site inner-urban labor contractor).
[Agency T] is actually three blocks from us, but they won’t recruit anybody that lives north of
the viaduct. In other words, you will not see an African American in their shop. . . They cater to
the undocumented community (Manager, small outer-urban placement agency).

Many of the inner-city agencies define themselves in terms of the principal ethnic
segments of the localized labor markets from which they draw. Here, agency managers
talked of essentially naturalized relationships between different ethnic groups and
‘appropriate’ segments of the job market, reflecting historic patterns of racial hiring
which they saw as their responsibility to ‘read’. As the manager of a small hiring and
placement service which mainly dealt with Latino workers explained, his organization
specialized in a different (ethnic/occupational) segment of the labor market to some of the
other agencies in the neighborhood, which in this case tended to concentrate on the
placement of Polish workers in relatively-skilled, machining jobs: ‘There’s a lot of Polish
agencies in this area . . . on their window it’s all in Polish. . . We advertise on the Latino
radio station’. This manager went on to rehearse the qualities of Latino workers which
supposedly rendered them both popular with employers and especially well-suited to
hard, menial temp work:
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With the Spanish people [sic], and a lot [of clients] request them, the majority of them don’t
speak the language [English]. A lot of companies, though, don’t mind. There are companies that
will request only Spanish-speaking people and may have a Spanish supervisor there. . .
Primarily, the plastics companies are the ones which are requesting that kind of individual. [Q.
Why is that?] That’s very simple, it’s an assembly line . . . so it’s real easy to instruct an
individual. . . Ninety percent of the staffing for a plastics company, and I’m talking strictly your
assembly line, are going to be your Hispanic. Anything that has to do with tool and die, that is
totally a different animal. Your recycling companies are primarily Hispanic-oriented, simply
because they’re out there in the winter time, when the doors open and the trucks come in with
the recycled goods, it’s actually pretty cold out there, and there’s not too many people who are
willing to do that. And actually do the work. And so the recycling companies are another one
who are looking for your Hispanic-background individuals (Manager, small inner-urban hiring
and placement service).

The flipside of this process is the effective exclusion of many African-American
workers, even from low-wage temp work. As Newman (1999: 156) has observed of the
situation in Chicago, ‘employers carry around a set of beliefs about job applicants from
the inner city that are deeply ingrained and fundamentally prejudicial. African-Americans
meet a wall of suspicion from employers and managers who believe they are more trouble
than they are worth. Chicago employers are prone to seeing the men as belligerent, the
women as saddled with children that they cannot take care of, and both men and women
as illiterate’. In Chicago, race and labor-market geography are intimately related, to the
point that neighborhoods have distinctive ethnic identities, in large part due to their
(surface-level) homogeneity. Even the most general geographical markers such as ‘South
Side’ tend to evoke clear images of the population: its race/ethnicity, its income status
and its place in the neighborhood hierarchy. Three-quarters of the Chicago employers
interviewed by Neckerman and Kirschenman (1991) expressed negative views of innercity blacks, particularly African-American males, whom they associated with dishonesty
and unreliability, a finding strongly echoed in Waldinger’s (1997) study of racialized
hiring practices in Los Angeles. Neckerman and Kirschenman also remarked upon the
ease with which employers were willing and able to ‘navigate’ urban labor pools through
the use of race-coded residential addresses as a form of geographical shorthand for
socioeconomic status and employability. So addresses on the South Side signal a variety
of (negative) job-related, neighborhood and social characteristics to employers.
This race-structured hiring regime is vividly reflected in the geographic location of
temp agencies, depicted in Figure 2. Of those agencies located in Chicago’s
neighborhoods, outside the Central Business District, virtually all are based in
communities with a significant Latino population. In contrast, there are almost no
agencies located in majority-black neighborhoods on the South Side and the West Side.
The most significant spatial concentrations of agencies are located in neighborhoods to
the north and south of the West Side, namely East Humboldt Park and West Town to the
north and Pilsen and Little Village to the south. Traditionally ports of entry for eastern
European migrants, these neighborhoods now have majority Latino populations and are
the target neighborhoods for the day-labor contractors, whose very addresses
subsequently send ‘appropriate’ race messages to employers.
As Abu-Lughod (1999: 332) has observed, ‘racial segregation remains almost
complete in Chicago’. Combined with the city’s deeply-ingrained tradition of racestructured hiring (Wilson, 1996) and the pronounced reduction in manufacturing
employment in neighborhoods with large black populations (Theodore and Taylor, 1991),
this adds up to a picture of systemic labor-market marginalization among AfricanAmerican workers. These dynamics of exclusion and peripheralization tend to become
self-fulfilling ones, as patterns of underemployment and dependency on unstable, lowpaying jobs are translated into personal work histories that to many employers spell
‘unreliability’, weak attachment to the workforce, fecklessness, and an inclination
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Figure 2 Location of temporary help services, City of Chicago, 1999 (sources: Temp agency data
derived from Chicago Consumer Yellow Pages and Chicago Business to Business Yellow Pages;
demographic data from Claritas)

towards crime and antisocial behavior (see Tienda and Stier, 1996; Wilson, 1996). The
modus operandi of temp agencies is such that, at best, prevailing practices of racialized
hiring are passively reproduced. The locational strategies of agencies — particularly their
deliberate avoidance of majority African-American neighborhoods in favor of largely
Latino areas — suggest a much more active role in the perpetuation and accentuation of
race-structured hiring. Temp agencies do not want themselves to be victims of addressbased discrimination: they target Latino neighborhoods and deploy crude screening and
placement techniques to ensure that employers ‘get what they want’.
The temp agencies’ location decisions, just like their hiring strategies, are highly
racialized. Their rationale — giving employers what they want, when and where they
want it — tends to be reflected, in the case of placement decisions, in an exaggerated
process of race-structured recruitment. And because, by definition, temp workers pass
through the screening and recruitment process much more frequently than ‘regular’
workers — in some instances, daily — they are as a group particularly vulnerable to
distortions and inequities in this process. The presence of temp agencies in an
intermediating role has the effect, then, of hardening and institutionalizing patterns of
job-market inequality, both spatially and socially. Perversely, while the strategies of temp
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agencies can in some senses be seen as a response to problems of spatial mismatch in
urban labor markets, in another sense their use of racialized recruitment channels serves
at the same time to further balkanize the job market along race lines.
Although some of this discriminatory hiring practice may be put down to racism on
the part of individual managers or tacit acceptance of local hiring conventions, at a more
fundamental level it reflects the fact that many (if not most) agencies are trapped in the
loop of price-based competition. Brutally, there is no margin in positive discrimination
here. In temp industry lore, employers are typically portrayed as intolerant, impatient
and simply too busy to listen to excuses. Agencies that are serious about keeping a
contract will try to anticipate, and respond fully, to clients’ expectations and
requirements, which means not only getting the billing rate and order size right, but
delivering a workforce ‘with the right attitudes’ and one that ‘fits in’ with the client’s
way of doing business. While some of the mid-market agencies seemed rather more
reluctant to acquiesce to employers’ demands, all conceded that discrimination, placing
undocumented workers and ‘body slamming’ (placing homeless people) were common
practices at the bottom end of the market. The prevalence of such practices, of course,
only served to confirm the poor image of the industry in the eyes of many potential
clients. Accordingly, some of the mid-market agencies sought explicitly to distance
themselves from the practices of the body slammers, signifying this in deliberate labormarket, business and location strategies, such as deeper screening, (small) wage markups, operating from ‘clean and respectable’ premises and so forth. In some cases, this
simply amounted to just another form of cursory screening, as workers — whose
physical appearance suggested that they might be homeless, a substance abuser, or who
just ‘didn’t look right’ — were simply turned away. In attempting to ‘trade up’ in this
way, then, agencies are hardly likely to counter the prevailing pattern of discriminatory
practice. They may even reinforce it.
If you are neat and clean, we try not to use people that are, I’m trying to find the right word —
bummy. We want people to present a good appearance. . . We do not body slam. We call [it]
body slamming where you grab that young man over there, who looks like he hasn’t slept in
ages. We don’t do that. [We are] very particular about the type of people we send . . . if you send
I don’t know what out there, it doesn’t say much about yourself, plus you lose business that way
(Manager #2, multi-site labor contractor).
I just can’t pay minimum wage. I just feel that if you want to make a person feel like a person
you just can’t. Most places do pay minimum wages. I just feel that if you want to make a person
feel like a person, at least pay them about $6. So that’s what we do. So a lot of business we don’t
get because it’s just too low. There’s a problem with inexperienced temp services bidding
contracts [too low] . . . and they have to go and scrape up all these minimum-wage people
(Owner-manager, small downtown agency).
[Some clients] still have in their mind that the temporary services are driving along some street
in the city and picking them up off the corner. A lot of the time they’ll say to me, you know, one
temporary service is the same as another. And I’ll say to them, if you believe that, well OK, but
maybe I can change your mind. It’s up to you, what do you want? (Manager, large multi-site
agency).

The low barriers to entry in the day-labor segment of the temp industry mean that this
sector is perpetually unstable and destructively price-competitive. While there was some
evidence that the more experienced users of temp services — many of whom had been
‘burned’ in earlier dealings with down-market agencies — tended to gravitate toward
more reputable (and invariably slightly more expensive) services, market conditions on
the whole were suppressed by persistent undercutting on the part of the low-cost
operators. This places a kind of competitive drag on the industry, a form of capillary
action which tends to reduce employment and business practices to the lowest common
denominator. There is consequently a sense in which ‘restructuring down’ is associated
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with internal, self-reinforcing dynamics of degradation: competitive pressures mean that
agencies which take the low-road restructuring path are likely to take others with them.

Conclusion: temp agencies and the regulation of contingent labor
markets
The explosion of the temp economy in Chicago and other US cities has been legitimized
by the entrenched culture of labor-market deregulation and the advocacy of flexibility as
a managerial virtue. Hence, the maturation of the temp industry holds far-reaching
implications for the structure and dynamics of labor markets. It represents an emergent
mode of privatized labor-market intermediation that both reflects and reinforces the
(de)regulatory logic of flexibilized labor markets. Temp working is contributing in a
variety of ways to the restructuring of labor markets, especially now that the temp
industry’s own hierarchies and patterns of labor segmentation are being stretched and
reworked. Temp agencies are playing a major role in reorganizing ports of entry (and,
crucially in this turbulent sector, re-entry) into the labor market, developments which we
have shown here to be intimately connected to the geographic restructuring of urban job
markets. There is a clear tendency in Chicago for hiring halls and day-labor contractors to
gravitate toward the source of their preferred labor supply, reflecting the need to mobilize
highly elastic sources of low-wage labor on a daily basis. This stands in marked contrast
to the locational strategies of the upward-restructuring agencies — the multinational
corporates specializing in better-paid and more formally-skilled workers, which are
typically based in high-rent offices in Chicago’s central business district or in suburban
office parks. Locationally, these agencies tend to be drawn toward the source of their
labor demand, reflecting the imperative of sustaining reflexive and enduring agencyclient relations.
For the bottom-end agencies, the presence of an elastic, abundant and minimumwage dependent labor supply is a functional prerequisite. These agencies have fashioned
strategies that enable them to reach deep into under-employed, inner-urban labor pools,
primarily in Latino communities, subsequently shipping and selling this labor supply to
suburban employers. Although, in principle, these workers are highly substitutable with
one another — having low levels of formal job qualifications and being prepared to
accept a wide variety of job assignments — we have seen that, in practice, even this
highly-commodified job market is socially structured and institutionalized in subtle but
important ways. So, while in a superficial sense the temp labor market resembles the kind
of ‘spot market’ for labor envisaged by neoclassical economists, it is, in fact, anything
but. The agencies’ work allocation systems favor ‘reliably contingent’ workers who are
available every day and whose work attitudes, job capabilities and personal attributes
render them acceptable to employers. And while these general criteria of workplace
acquiescence and reliability/availability play a key role in configuring the temp job
queue, it is also important to recognize that this job queue is socially structured according
to location, race, gender and physical appearance. In providing what employers want, and
expect, temp agencies harden and institutionalize processes of labor segmentation at the
point of entry into the job market, with potentially wide-ranging and long-term effects for
occupational mobility, employment security and wage prospects. In particular, the temp
agencies’ intermediary presence seems to be amplifying the effects of racialized selection
and recruitment systems, further to the detriment of African-American workers. This
resonates with Waldinger’s (1996; 1997) argument that the process of job competition
between African-American and Latino workers is socially mediated and institutionally
structured, often in locally-specific ways. In the Chicago case, Latinos have apparently
been constructed as a naturalized contingent workforce — hardworking, pliant and
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prepared to accept low-paid, grueling and insecure work — while temp agencies have
emerged as the principal brokers of such labor in the inner city.
The continuing capacity of the workforce to endure these employment conditions is
predicated, first, on the absence of real alternatives, and, second, on the constant
replenishment of Chicago’s low-skilled labor pools through in-migration. The evident
crowding of many low-wage labor markets (Carlson and Theodore, 1995) and the
surprisingly long employment tenures of some temps both suggest that the underlying
causes of temporary working are more likely to lie on the demand side of the labor market
— with overall demand deficiency and the structural shift towards contingent work —
than on the supply side. But this does not mean that demand is independent of supply. In
fact, the two are co-constituted in ways sensitive to the localized geographies of the labor
market (Hanson and Pratt, 1995; Peck, 1996). Spatial dynamics link dependent labor
supplies and contingent labor demand: while there is little evidence of workers opting for
day-labor as a ‘lifestyle choice’ — many will work quite steadily if they are given the
opportunity — the very existence of large, under-employed and minimum wagedependent labor pools in Chicago’s low-income neighborhoods facilitates expansion of
temp employment.
There is a sense, then, in which the emergence of new (or reworked) contingent
labor-market forms, such as temping, is predicated on the presence of such
disenfranchized and under-employed labor pools. This might be seen as a perverse case
of supply creating its own demand. But the arrival of temp agencies in areas of inner-city
job shortage is significant not simply by virtue of its effects on labor-market arithmetic;
more fundamentally, it is also about remaking the regulatory ‘rules’ of the labor market.
Temp agencies may be businesses, but they are also regulatory institutions, and as such
are sites of rule-making and rule-enforcement in (contingent) labor markets. In this sense,
temp agencies can be seen as an element of an emergent, privatized ‘regime of regulation’
for contingent labor markets of the secondary sector (see Abraham, 1990; Gottfried,
1992; Allen and Henry 1996). This article has highlighted a number of aspects to this
inchoate, imperfect and contradictory regulatory role. First, and on the supply side, temp
agencies are actively engaged in deepening, broadening and flexibilizing the supply of
labor for contingent jobs in the sense that their practices serve to expose and commodify
hitherto-inaccessible, localized niches within urban labor pools. Second, and on the
demand side, the agencies’ ability to deliver a virtually instantaneous labor supply means
that it becomes feasible to develop new forms of contingent jobs, or rather fractions of
jobs, thereby increasing the relative and absolute size of the contingent labor market.
Specifically, temp agencies permit suburban employers to make use of contingent labor
strategies (and contingent labor supplies) which otherwise would have been beyond their
reach.
Third, in terms of the social distribution of work, the intermediary role of agencies
tends to intensify discriminatory hiring practices and patterns, further balkanizing the
lower end of the labor market on the basis of workers’ ascribed (race, gender etc.) rather
than achieved (skills, ‘human capital’ etc.) characteristics. Specifically, the Chicago case
shows how the locational decisions and placement strategies of temp agencies are
contributing to the pronounced racialization of contingent working. Fourth, with respect
to changing power relations in the labor market, temp agency allocation procedures and
payment systems serve to enforce workplace discipline (on behalf of employers), while
the constitution of competitive relationships between workers — on a daily and
individual basis — undermines the foundations for collective consciousness and action.
As Burawoy (1985: 265) points out, the formation of such an ‘atomized and vulnerable
labour force’ facilitates a form of job-market ‘subordination without struggle’. And,
finally, in the context of the labor market as a whole, temp agencies are functioning to
stretch the envelope of labor contingency, by driving down the costs of recruitment,
hiring and induction in ways which disproportionately favor high-turnover segments of
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the job market. Temp agencies also reduce the relative cost of employing contingent
labor by enforcing flexibility on employers’ terms, by distributing work according to
‘reliability’ and ‘attitude’, and by managing workplace and hiring/firing ‘hassles’ for
employers.
In these and other ways, temp agencies are active institutional agents in the making
and remaking of contingent labor market relations. Their multiple roles in labor
mobilization, screening, recruitment and placement, in the maintenance of workplace and
labor-market discipline, in driving down and holding down the costs/wages of cheap
labor, and in spreading and externalizing the risks associated with contingent
employment, together mean that temp agencies have become a significant — and
growing — institutional presence in the job market. Aside from their complex functions
as agents of labor-market (re)regulation, temp agencies also have a material, business
interest in growing the contingent, flexible ‘periphery’ of the job market at the expense of
the ‘core’, again drawing attention to what is an active rather than simply passive role in
the restructuring of labor-market structures, norms and conventions. In the Chicago case
in particular, the presence of a large (and yet still expanding) infrastructure of temp
agencies has come to exert an important influence on the path of labor-market
restructuring, facilitating as it has the simultaneous suburbanization and flexibilization of
jobs by opening up low-cost recruitment channels into the contingent labor pools of the
inner city. Hence our particular interest in this article in exploring some of the ways in
which temp agencies are rewriting the rules, restructuring the incentive-systems and
reworking the geographies of urban labor markets.
Jamie Peck (jpeck@geography.wisc.edu), Department of Geography, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA and Nik Theodore (theodore
@uic.edu), Urban Planning and Policy Program and Center for Urban Economic
Development, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60607, USA.

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