How much is the Temp Agency that I work for getting paid for my services?
Here’s one way to find out what they’re charging you out for (and this is without knowing whether you are working in an administrative capacity) See if you can intercept any mail coming from the the temp agency (usually marked confidential!). Open it, it’ll likely contain a statement for your services. I actually did this- but I was working as a receptionist. I just played dumb when asked about why I’d opened confidential mail, since, hey, my job consisted of opening mail. I was working for $10/hour at the time and if I remember correctly, they were charging me out at $17. This was 10 years ago, though. Temp agencies are a bloody waste of time, IMHO. Don’t bother fighting with them for a higher wage. They don’t care.
When I interned/contracted at a telco in college I realized the same huge discrepancy you’ve stumbled upon and would bitch about it with the consultants during lunch. They mentioned that if you’re going to continue contracting/consulting for an extended period of time it is sometimes possible to set yourself up an S-Corp (Jersey personal business type – don’t know anything about other states), have the employer pay your personal S-Corp as a proxy staffing agency and then pay yourself in dividends. Even with capital gains you usually come out on the plus side. There’s alot of personal income math and tax estimation to be done beforehand but I knew individuals who took home extra tens of thousands a year doing it. Disclaimer: not saying ‘gogogo!,’ just throwing it out there as an option to look into.
One more thought, I’m pretty sure that you don’t have leverage at all, regardless. I think I recall signing something that the company had to work with the agency to officially hire me. The agency would be responsible for negotiating my salary – I was out of the equation. I think the thought was that clearly the agency would try to negotiate for a high salary, since they get a cut. I might be wrong in this, or maybe it was unique to the firm I worked with, but it just popped up from my memory. It may be useful to find out if this is the case in your agency.
There’s not really any way to find out unless you can find someone to tell you (and that person probably should not tell you if they are following the rules). Temps are not supposed to know what is being paid for their services. Being as how the fee being paid for your services is probably considered private business information that you are not supposed to have by your employer, trying to leverage the information in a salary negotiation would probably be a bad idea. The issue that the total cost of employing you versus your wage that others have raised is a valid issue as well, and makes it harder to compare the two. Stick with conventional research (salary surveys etc.) and conventional negotiation to get the best salary you can manage.
In my experience, the markup is about 40% for clerical/administrative work. Nthing everyone else that they will not pay you as much as they paid the temp agency — they were paying the temp agency for your services as well as the temp agency’s services. (Not defending the markup. Resisting the urge to post off-topic stories.
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- How much is the Temp Agency that I work for getting paid for my services?
