Temporary Staff, Contractors, and Volunteers: The Hidden Workforce in Victorian Local Government

Abstract

Theories of strategic Human Resource Management (HRM) emphasise the need to understand and effectively manage the workforce, and to align HRM practices with organisational strategy. Local government in Victoria was radically revised in 1993-94 with forced amalgamations, and later the introduction of Best Value Principles. Alongside this have been changes to council workforces. This article explores the composition of these workforces, and seeks to understand if strategic HRM practices underpin their management. It reports that in addition to the 'known' and 'managed' internal workforce, many councils have an external workforce which includes temporary staff, independent contractors, those working for external contractors, volunteers, work placement students and trainees. There is little evidence that theories of strategic HRM have been used to produce workforce planning strategies and policies relating to these staff, or that their management has been strategically aligned and reviewed to align with council strategies and business plans.

Learning and development opportunities as a tool for the retention of volunteers: a motivational perspective

“…Human Resource (HR) professionals have traditionally focused on the management and development of paid employees. However, the growing need for a volunteer workforce in many organisations, whether they are non‐profit, public or private sector (McKeown and Lindorff, ), makes it critical to effectively attract, manage, develop and ultimately retain these unique and valuable resources. For those tasked with the issue of attracting and retaining talent in general, a better understanding of how to best achieve these outcomes with a volunteer workforce will only continue to grow in importance.…”

Emergency management and HRM in local governments: HR professionals as network managers

“…An important part of these reforms was the dramatic reduction of the size of the local government workforce through contracting out of services and HR. These reforms were part of the introduction of NPM with the aim of introducing private sector management practice such as HRM to reduce inefficiencies of traditional public sector management practices (McKeown and Lindorff ). New Public Management reforms (Currie and Martin ) are often promoted as a solution to increasing costs and criticisms of traditional public sector management (Radnor and Johnston ).…”

“…Over the last two decades, local governments around the world have undergone substantial changes through New Public Management (NPM) and other reforms to increase their performance and accountability (French and Goodman 2012). Australian local governments have been noexception, having undergone substantial change (McKeown and Lindorff 2011;Poole, Mansfield and Gould-Williams 2006). Structural reform within Victorian local governments throughout the 1990s saw forced local government amalgamations which reduced councils from 210 to form 78.…”

“…As a consequence of NPM, there has been a growth of interest in HRM among public sector organisations over the past two decades (Brunetto, Farr-Wharton and Shacklock 2011). Despite this growth of HRM research in the public sector, much less research attention has been given to local governments (French and Goodman 2012;McKeown and Lindorff 2011). In a rare study of HRM in local governments, French and Goodman (2012) evaluated the experiences of HRM professionals across 184 American municipalities to determine the extent of HRM practice.…”

Using Gis to Understand and Prioritise Worker Movements During the 2012 London Olympics

“…As discussed in Section 2.2.3, the Electronic Survey could only reach a third of employees, and contained an inherent sampling bias by querying PC users alone. The remaining 9,107 staff members were for the most part school staff, contractors, temporary workers and street cleaners, characterised as a hidden workforce in the context of local government management (McKeown & Lindorff, 2011). It was unclear whether these staff members were similarly distributed outside the borough.…”