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| What are the legalities of hiring temp to perm? How long can you have someone work temp before going perm? After the applicant has been hired on as a perm employee, can they have a 3 month probation period? Is a temp employee entitled to benefits or unemployment if their services are no longer required? Do you need the temporary employee to sign a document stating that they understand they are working temp to perm?
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Contingent Workers
Temporary, Seasonal, and Part-time Employees
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Short-term employees, such as temporary, seasonal, and specialized employees, all are employed for a limited period of time or an identified project. You can decide whether they will be given benefits, vacation, sick time, etc. based on your own policies. The law does not specify duration of time after which he/she becomes a regular employee.
Best Practices
Decide if part-time and temporary employees will be eligible for benefits or your retirement plan.
Decide if part-time and temporary employees are eligible for your health plan.
View All Specialized employees are those who are brought in for a short time due to their expertise in a particular area. They may be hired on a short-term basis to handle a project outside the employer’s normal realm, such as setting up a computer system or heading up an employer’s efforts to rezone a piece of property on which it wants to build a new plant.
You should not discriminate against a protected class of employees by restricting them to temporary positions that limit their earnings or benefits.
Issues Related to Short-term Employment
Short-term employment creates a number of issues that you should consider before hiring these employees:
Will the short-term employee work enough hours to be entitled to participate in your retirement plan?
Will the short-term employee count toward the threshold number of employees for purposes of the federal plant closing law — Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN), or its California equivalent? WARN counts short-term employees toward the threshold. The California law covers employers of 75 or more “persons” and so would include temporary and seasonal employees for the purpose of determining applicability of the law.
In a union workplace, is a short-term employee within the scope of a collective bargaining unit? In a non-union workplace, could short-term employees cause or participate in organizational activity? Short-term employees may be included. See Health Care Staffing for more information.
Can you provide different benefits to short-term and regular employees, or no benefits at all to short-term employees? You may provide different benefit levels to different employees as long as the benefit is not withheld on an illegally discriminatory basis. Differentiating between short-term and regular employees is not illegal discrimination. You need only provide short-term employees with the benefits required by law, such as workers’ compensation coverage. However, if you provide a short-term employee with health benefits, he/she may be entitled to rights under COBRA. See COBRA, Employees Covered for more information.
While a short-term employee is clearly entitled to the protections of anti-discrimination laws, will he/she count toward the minimum employee threshold determining whether a particular anti-discrimination law applies to the employer? Some anti-discrimination laws, such as the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), do not clearly define whether a short-term employee is counted toward the threshold number. Conflicting answers on this and other laws have come from various courts and policy-making bodies (such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC]).
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