By Christina Kopsini - Kathimerini

Adecco, one of the world’s biggest personnel recruitment companies, said last week its placements in the Greek market in 2005 were overwhelmingly for temporary positions. Out of 4,985 placements only 257 concerned permanent employment, with the remaining 4,728 going to temporary employment posts.

The sample, even though not representative of the market as a whole, is indicative of the rising popularity of temporary work in Greece. Unfortunately, neither the Manpower Organization (OAED) nor the Labor Inspectorate have gone to the trouble of presenting in detail any data about the development of the flexible forms of employment in the domestic labor market.

Nevertheless, just the sample of the thousands of jobless who participate in the EU-funded “stage” program, which offers temporary employment for work training, is enough to confirm the explosion of the phenomenon in Greece. The rise in temporary employment is confirmed by the latest Interior Ministry data showing 233,969 temporary contracts over the last couple of years.

In actual fact, temporary work is the new link connecting all labor models around Europe. Full and steady employment is declining, giving way to temporary work in Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and of course in the UK.

The first wave of this model, expressed in various forms, emerged in the late 1990s, suggests a recent report by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, an EU body. In Portugal the number of the temporarily employed grew by 50 percent in the 1997-2002 period. In Austria’s metal industry it rose by 27 percent from 2002 to 2004; in the same period temporary employment in Ireland shot up by 68 percent and it doubled in Finland.

In total, the share of temporary employment may remain low among all workers, but it is increasing rapidly. In France this increase is impressive. Although in the whole of the work force from 1999 to 2004 its share did not exceed 2 percent, during 2000 it reached 9.6 percent in construction, 16.6 percent in industry and 23.2 percent in services.

In Germany, the temporary workers through private agencies rose from 138,451 in 1994 to 339,022 in 2002 and exceeded 400,000 in 2004. In Britain the percentage of temping through agencies was around 4 percent in the 2000-04 period.

France is also an impressive example, with the average length of temporary employment contracts no more than 9.5 days. In Spain about a third of placements in temporary work have a duration of under one week. The average in Finland is 19 days, in Norway 145 hours and in Germany the majority is employed for less than three months.

The longest temporary employment on average is to be found in Austria; more than 50 percent of the temporarily employed white-collar workers stay in the same position for an entire year or even more.

It is not only unskilled workers who enter temping. In Norway 40 percent of those employed temporarily have a university degree, while in Britain 8.5 percent are active in financial services.