Temporary Help Service Workers: Employment Characteristics and Wage Determination

This paper studies temporary help service (THS) workers, a growing component of the secondary labor market. It analyzes two samples of workers in the same four clerical occupations-bookkeepers, typists, key-punch operators, and clerks. The two samples-one for workers employed via a large THS firm in Israel, the other for full-time, non-THS workers drawn from the 1983 Israeli Census-are compared for demographic and human capital characteristics, wage levels, and wage regressions. The results lead us to conclude that viewing THS workers as a homogeneous group of "secondary" workers is not warranted.