Home Still Isn’t Where the Temp Worker Is, Frustrated Small Firms Find

Fourteen years ago, when small-business authors Paul and Sarah Edwards were writing the first of their eight books on home-based businesses, not one temporary employment agency would send secretarial help to their Sierra Madre house to work on the manuscript stored in their computer.

Every temp agency they called told them that temporary workers were sent only to offices and factories in commercial districts, not to people’s homes.

Because e-mail and floppy disks weren’t readily available in those early days of personal computers, the Edwardses resorted to a desperate measure. They packed up their computer, drove it down to the temp agency and had someone work on it out of the agency’s office.

“I was hoping that it was getting better,” Sarah Edwards says now.

But things haven’t improved. Despite the proliferation of home-based businesses, independent consultants and contractors working from home, most temp agencies still won’t send workers to businesses operating out of private residences.

“I think it’s pretty well-known we don’t provide temporary employees to homes,” said Marty Rome of Kelly Services, the oldest of the temporary services with 1,700 offices worldwide and $4 billion in sales.

Kelly is typical. Most major companies in the staffing industry as a matter of course avoid sending temporary help to home-based businesses, said Edward Lenz, senior vice president of the National Assn. of Temporary and Staffing Services. The Alexandria, Va.-based organization represents more than 1,600 staffing companies nationwide.

“The prospect or opportunity to send one or two people [to a home-based business] has to be offset against the risks where workers are not subject to [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] regulations and work site safety, the home is more vulnerable, and the [worker] might be exposed to a greater degree of harassment or danger,” Lenz said.

A few exceptions exist, such as PDQ Personnel in Los Angeles, whose owner, Patty De Dominic, began as a small-business owner herself and sympathizes with small businesses, said Janet Ault, PDQ vice president. Although not a large part of its overall business, PDQ routinely sends temp workers to home-based businesses.

“We have done so for several years and have had no problems,” Ault said. But, she added, “We qualify our clients ahead of time. . . . We make sure that we know who the people are and the nature of the business.”

Indeed, the nature of home-based business may preclude some business owners from even seeking temporary help.

“There’s something about having an associate at your dining room table that is extremely uncomfortable,” said Sydney Weisman, who with her husband, David, operated Weisman Hamline Public Relations out of their home for seven years before moving to a commercial office five years ago. “We would never bring temporary help into our home. It was too invasive.”

But for the home-based business faced with a sudden increase in workload or a project deadline that can only be met with extra help, temporary agencies usually provide no solution. Thus, without the opportunity to hire outside temporary professional help, home-based business owners can find it that much harder to add staff for periodic work upsurges and to even grow, since many small businesses rely on temporary help as a way to expand without hiring permanent employees. Small-business owners who get around the staffing difficulty by bringing in other self-employed people can also find themselves in legal hot water, in danger of violating complicated and confusing independent contractor laws.

Temporary staffing for home-based businesses is “one of the few areas that remain that are discriminatory against people that work at home,” Sarah Edwards said.

The reasons given by the temp agencies against sending help to home-based business can often seem baseless. For example, temp agencies say they want to avoid the liability they might face for theft of personal items by workers in home-based businesses. Yet, maid, nanny and gardener services seem to have little difficulty surmounting that problem by carrying liability insurance, the same as temp agencies.

Other oft-cited reasons are that the safety of the temporary workers can’t be assured because a private home is not as accessible to public scrutiny as a commercial office, home-based businesses are not subject to federal or state safety regulations, and workers in the home could be more at risk for sexual harassment.

Yet, even permanent workers are not that well-protected in commercial workplaces. Workers routinely spend their days in isolated offices in suburban or outlying business parks with very little foot traffic. State and federal OSHA inspectors can’t even inspect most commercial offices because there aren’t enough inspectors to cover the thousands of workplaces. And the commercial office setting is no guarantee that sexual harassment won’t occur.

Lenz of the National Assn. of Temporary and Staffing Services suggests that temporary agencies may have an even more powerful economic reason for not sending workers to home-based businesses. Agencies must spend money advertising and marketing their services, courting employers, recruiting workers and keeping track of them. It’s more cost-effective to place large numbers of workers in large corporations than to put them one by one into home-based businesses.

“It’s certainly well-known that the largest users of temporary services are the largest companies,” Lenz said. “It certainly makes sense for a staffing firm to target large firms. If you’ve got business with a two- or three-employee company, the likelihood of growing is far less.”

Faced with the large risks, overhead costs and small prospects for growth from home-based businesses, temporary agencies are not likely to alter their practices soon. Serving the small-business community is simply not cost-effective nor profitable for them, a problem many large corporations also encounter, even when they desire to target the small-business market.

Yet, as the economy increasingly changes to become an army of small companies, with thousands of self-employed working from home on a project-by-project basis, temporary agencies and other large corporations could find their market share growing smaller if they continue to ignore the small-business community.

The future “E-lance economy,” explored by Thomas W. Malone and Robert J. Luabacher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a recent issue of Harvard Business Review, suggests that ad hoc teams using the Internet and advanced communications software could fundamentally transform the nature and structure of business. Indeed, Los Angeles is already known now, especially in the entertainment and technology industries, as a locale where temporary companies are formed and dismantled on a project-by-project basis with no bricks and mortar involved.

By keeping their hands wide open to catch the big dollars from big corporations, temporary agencies and other staffing firms risk losing the millions of dollars in nickels and dimes that could trickle through their fingers for lack of a way to catch this small-business money.

In the temporary staffing industry, if the majors don’t begin now to address this segment of the market by creating networks or business directories or some sort of screening and referral process, small businesses will figure out how to do it by themselves, without the temporary agencies. And then it could be the majors with the business problem.

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Times staff writer Vicki Torres can be reached at (213) 237-6553 or by e-mail at vicki.torres@latimes.com.