In recent years, temporary work has not been booming as strongly as it was in the years before the crisis of 2009. The question arises as to whether this flattening of growth is primarily a temporary effect of the business cycle or constitutes evidence of structural changes such as might have been caused by ever tighter statutory regulation. The stricter regulation envisaged by Germany’s current grand coalition government could inhibit the function of temporary agency work in labour market policy without offering any prospect of further qualitative development. This will prove a problem for temporary agency employees. For example, in the case of a restriction on the assignment period for temporary agency workers, the proportion of clients who would prefer to dispense with this business service altogether is, at 32 per cent, higher than the 29 per cent who would be prepared to take on the temporary employees themselves.
As expected, firms react to the sudden drop in their demand for labour with a chain of different policies. The statistics show a severe decrease in hirings.
Companies are suspected of expanding the use of flexible forms of employment, such as fixed-term contracts, temporary and contingent work, at the expense of the development of their core workforce.
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German Economic Institute (IW) 
