While you may not be planning any move soon, you might be interested in learning about the advantages of job mobility. For years now, the United States and Great Britain have been the kings of job mobility… offering a more flexible job market, where other countries seem to have remained stagnant with respect to the advantages that such movements afford to our economy.

The concept of “temp agencies� or “temporary job agencies� has certainly taken off here in Spain, but again it takes on a local flavor. It would seem that what was originally planned out to be beneficial towards employees has been actually more beneficial to local businesses as an excuse to avoid the costs of permanent positions.

Temp agencies try to interact with headhunters to find the best talent available in a particular field. They serve as the bulwark for some activiities which actually require “new blood� at a constant rate. Take for instance the stock market. On the stock market, it is increasingly more difficult to find people who are physically and mentally able to deal with the stress and challenges which each day brings. Orders come in by the thousands and trades are executed perhaps every milisecond.

What keeps the market driving are these temporary workers known as “runners� on the “floor� of the stock market. They carry out a simple, but very important function: they carry messages from brokers to traders. The idea of a runner has almost disappeared however, with the advent of new technologies which have increased the speed of data transmission and made trading processes more efficient.

Temporary jobs offer another add-on benefit to workers: they expose them to new and interesting fields or professions and allow them to pick and choose the type of work which best suits them. Unfortunately, temp agencies are renown for trying to keep workers temporary instead of negotiating with companies to make such employees permanent or place them on the company payroll. For their services, they receive a percentage of the worker’s salary. This is what makes them profitable.

While it would appear that workers seem to have gotten a raw deal, there are still headhunters out there that are becoming increasingly more productive and indeed have expanded their scope of business to include very large and lucrative businesses that offer new job opportunities along with hefty salaries.

The idea of temping has kept the job market and entrepeneurs in check. Big business knows that if they do not pay their workers well enough, they may very well lose their employees- and especially talented ones – to the competition.

Flexibility in the job market is a sure sign of economic stability. And also the opposite is true. If all contracts are turned into temporary ones, there will surely be an undesired effect on the part of workers who deserve the same stability which entrepeneurs themselves enjoy. The gauntlet has been thrown down and the duel has begun. Who will win? Big business or the common worker? In Europe, the fight has only just begun….

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