[jonssons]

as an ex-temp worker: that's how it is. You want to work, you have to put up with the stuff they throw at you. No. It's not fair. No. It's not just. It's for the poor. It's for the uneducated. It's for the immigrants. It's for the vulnerable people, because they are easy to exploit. They don't know their own rights.

Temp offices should not be allowed to exist.

[dsfyu404ed]

>Temp offices should not be allowed to exist.

I disagree.

Working for a temp agency doing catering, sports venue and whatnot is generally more stable income than working for several places like that directly. Temp agencies work well for industries where demand is variable but predictable.

Companies that use temps to fill their baseline staffing requirements to skirt legal/ethical requirements are terrible though.

[frandroid]

Catering companies, sports venues, etc. can still have you on-call. The difference between a temp agency and a catering company is that it completely severs the employment relation which protects the workers by law.

[dsfyu404ed]

Yes, and that's usually worse than getting a fairly predictable number of hours from a temp agency. A temp agency will generally try to avoid asking an employees to be in multiple places at once. It's a pretty simple resource allocation problem.

[jonssons]

I had to depart quickly so I had to cut it short. To elaborate further:

The temp offices usually work with day contracts, allowing them to 'fire' you when you get a bad review, they don't need you that day or they don't like you. This provides a very unstable income.

In my case, the company that was hiring me used the temp jobs as a kind of 'trial period' and easily disposable workforce. If somebody did not live up to expectations, that person does not come back, but every day, 50 of those workers were needed. It took me 1.5 year as a temp worker on day contracts to get a permanent contract from the employer. I was a lucky exception.

Looking back on the stress, the uncertainty, the misery and humiliation I had to undergo to keep the most basic job, I would never, ever go back to that industry again.