CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Manufacturing Plants' Use of Temporary Workers: An Analysis Using Census Micro Data

December 2008

Working Paper Number:

CES-08-40

Abstract

Using plant-level data from the Plant Capacity Utilization (PCU) Survey, we examine how manufacturing plants' use of temporary workers is associated with the nature of their output fluctuations and other plant characteristics. We find that plants tend to hire temporary workers when their output can be expected to fall, a result consistent with the notion that firms use temporary workers to reduce costs associated with dismissing permanent employees. In addition, we find that plants whose future output levels are subject to greater uncertainty tend to use more temporary workers. We also examine the effects of wage and benefit levels for permanent workers, unionization rates, turnover rates, seasonal factors, and plant size and age on the use of temporary workers; based on our results, we discuss various views of why firms use temporary workers.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
utilization, payroll, employee, employ, employed, labor, efficiency, workforce, employing, worker, hire, plant employment, labor statistics, layoff, union

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech, including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Metropolitan Statistical Area, Census of Manufactures, Annual Survey of Manufactures, Standard Industrial Classification, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Longitudinal Research Database, Ordinary Least Squares, Permanent Plant Number, Federal Reserve Bank, Supreme Court, Current Population Survey, Longitudinal Business Database, Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Chicago Census Research Data Center, Special Sworn Status, Federal Reserve Board of Governors

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