Temporary Jobs

Re "Temporary Employment Industry Working Overtime," July 5: Big business is at it again! Short workweeks, low pay, no benefits. Cheap labor, insecurity. Lack of funds to support a family. No buying power. Happy days are here again! It's the mid-1930s and I was there--now it's called temps, then it was called cheap labor. How quickly companies forget why unions were born. JACK BRUKMAN Van Nuys My mortgage isn't temporary, my taxes aren't temporary, my family isn't temporary.

NEW YORK - Before the recession, Amie Crawford was an interior designer, earning $50,000 a year patterning baths and cabinets for architectural firms. Now, she's a "team member" at the Protein Bar in Chicago, where she makes $8.50 an hour, slightly more than minimum wage. It was the only job she could find after months of looking. Crawford, now 56, says she needed to take the job to stop the hemorrhaging of her retirement accounts. In her spare time, Crawford works with a Chicago group called Action Now, which is staging protests to raise the minimum wage in a state where it hasn't been raised since 2006.

Up to 6 million Americans, or about 5% of the work force, hold temporary jobs, the Labor Department said Thursday in the first official estimate of the temporary labor force. The results were well below estimates offered by private analysts. Some had suggested that as much as 30% of 123 million employed Americans were are in "contingent" jobs, or jobs structured to last a limited time.

May was tough for Darlene Williams. Her unemployment benefits ran out. She paid her rent of $1,116 in June out of the $2,000 left in her life savings. In July, her church kept a roof over her head. In August, the Actors Fund did. In September, a friend handed her $1,200. Now it's October. The rent's past due. Williams wobbles on the cliff's edge. You would not know it by her bearing, which is regal - shoulders back, spine straight, head held high - or by her cheerful, put-together look.

A little-known Los Angeles County jobs program is paying $10 an hour to several thousand workers at temporary jobs in businesses around Los Angeles, including hundreds of small firms. Using federal economic stimulus funds, the county is hiring the jobless to work at these companies for up to a year. In exchange, the businesses provide training, build job skills and get extra workers at little or no cost. For small businesses hard-hit by the economic downtown, the chance for extra workers is a welcome boost — even if it means providing training and work space for the temps.

Supervisor Don Knabe said Wednesday that Los Angeles County could create as many as 10,000 temporary jobs with funding from a federal stimulus package signed into law by President Obama last month. Knabe, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, asked staffers to use more than $100 million in federal funds to create subsidized jobs. The county would be required to pay 20% of the compensation for most of the employees. "The problem here is that it's temporary.

For Simone Heard, the bombshell dropped on a sultry Tuesday morning in July. She had reached the bottom of a heap of documents she had been typing and sorting for days, and she triumphantly turned the work over to her supervisor. "She took it and said, 'This is it for you,' " Heard recalls. Heard wanted to cry but simply nodded. "I tried not to show any emotion. But I was very, very upset. I felt very demoralized." Heard felt entitled to neither an explanation nor a dramatic departure.

A little-known Los Angeles County jobs program is paying $10 an hour to several thousand workers at temporary jobs in businesses around Los Angeles, including hundreds of small firms. Using federal economic stimulus funds, the county is hiring the jobless to work at these companies for up to a year. In exchange, the businesses provide training, build job skills and get extra workers at little or no cost. For small businesses hard-hit by the economic downtown, the chance for extra workers is a welcome boost — even if it means providing training and work space for the temps.

NEW YORK - Before the recession, Amie Crawford was an interior designer, earning $50,000 a year patterning baths and cabinets for architectural firms. Now, she's a "team member" at the Protein Bar in Chicago, where she makes $8.50 an hour, slightly more than minimum wage. It was the only job she could find after months of looking. Crawford, now 56, says she needed to take the job to stop the hemorrhaging of her retirement accounts. In her spare time, Crawford works with a Chicago group called Action Now, which is staging protests to raise the minimum wage in a state where it hasn't been raised since 2006.

2 Firms Unite to Find Temporary Jobs for Laid-Off Workers: New York-based Drake Beam Morin Inc., which helps find permanent jobs for out-of-work clients, and Milwaukee-based temporary-help agency Manpower Inc. announced that they will work together to find temporary positions for highly skilled people laid off from white-collar jobs. The partnership comes against a backdrop of large-scale layoffs that have affected a broad range of businesses and show little sign of abating.

Home improvement chain Home Depot Inc. is looking to fill 2,000 temporary jobs in the Los Angeles area and 70,000 positions nationwide in advance of the spring cleanup and gardening season, its busiest time of year. "Just as the Christmas rush and holiday hiring ends for many retailers, we begin recruiting for spring seasonal associates," Tim Crow, the company's executive vice president for human resources, said in a statement. Crow said a seasonal job at the Atlanta-based chain can lead to a regular position.

Home improvement chain Home Depot Inc. is looking to fill 2,000 temporary jobs in the Los Angeles area and 70,000 positions nationwide in advance of spring, its busiest season. "Just as the Christmas rush and holiday hiring ends for many retailers, we begin recruiting for spring seasonal associates," Tim Crow, the company's executive vice president for human resources, said in a statement. Crow said a seasonal job at the Georgia-based chain can lead to a regular position. Last year, about half of the seasonal hires snagged permanent jobs as cashiers, sales associates and garden associates, among other positions.

It didn't take Luke Walton long to start popping up in living rooms. The Lakers forward has jumped into his temporary job as an assistant coach with the University of Memphis, making his first home visit recently to help the Tigers recruit Alex Poythress, a Kevin Durant clone who lives near Memphis and is also considering Duke, Florida, Kentucky and Vanderbilt. "I told him my story," Walton said, sharing with the recruit how he went from a solid college player at Arizona to an eight-year career with the Lakers.

A little-known Los Angeles County jobs program is paying $10 an hour to several thousand workers at temporary jobs in businesses around Los Angeles, including hundreds of small firms. Using federal economic stimulus funds, the county is hiring the jobless to work at these companies for up to a year. In exchange, the businesses provide training, build job skills and get extra workers at little or no cost. For small businesses hard-hit by the economic downtown, the chance for extra workers is a welcome boost — even if it means providing training and work space for the temps.

A little-known Los Angeles County jobs program is paying $10 an hour to several thousand workers at temporary jobs in businesses around Los Angeles, including hundreds of small firms. Using federal economic stimulus funds, the county is hiring the jobless to work at these companies for up to a year. In exchange, the businesses provide training, build job skills and get extra workers at little or no cost. For small businesses hard-hit by the economic downtown, the chance for extra workers is a welcome boost — even if it means providing training and work space for the temps.

With local agencies already touting projects that are underway, Los Angeles County supervisors Tuesday criticized the county's effort to get stimulus money as too slow and bureaucratic and said their lobbyists in Washington were providing too little information on when those funds would be available locally. "As of today, maybe even tomorrow, we don't know if that money's going to flow direct so that we have access to it . . . or if it will flow through the state and they'll take a huge chunk of it," said Supervisor Don Knabe, who announced earlier this month that he hoped to use federal money to fund 10,000 temporary jobs but now said he was unsure the deal will come together as planned.

More than 150,000 temporary jobs will be created by a Mexican government plan to build rural roads in 270 areas throughout the nation, the Communications Department says. Nearly 1,400 miles of new roads are planned for isolated areas in mountain, desert and forest regions where residents lack such essential services as electricity, hospitals and clinics and schools.

About 3,000 people, including laid-off executives and company bosses, applied for temporary jobs caring for animals at a zoo in central England. Twycross Zoo in Atherstone is home to lions, elephants and dozens of primates, and it advertised for temporary cleaners, cooks and park rangers. People who had held well-paid, skilled jobs were among the applicants.

Layoffs may be sweeping the country, but one enterprise is hiring roughly 1.4 million people nationwide at salaries of $10 to $25 an hour: the 2010 census. A small army of laborers will be needed to locate, count and categorize each of the nation's residents. This spring, 140,000 workers will verify addresses across the country. And in 2010, an estimated 1.2 million will take to the streets to gather information from people who didn't return their census forms, U.S.

Supervisor Don Knabe said Wednesday that Los Angeles County could create as many as 10,000 temporary jobs with funding from a federal stimulus package signed into law by President Obama last month. Knabe, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, asked staffers to use more than $100 million in federal funds to create subsidized jobs. The county would be required to pay 20% of the compensation for most of the employees. "The problem here is that it's temporary.