Danger lurks for the unwary temp.

Press, 1 December 1987, Page 34

Danger lurks for the unwary temp.

When the Liverpool office of Kelly Temporary Services placed a lone woman on an oil rig with a crew of French workers, it had certain misgivings. The client company was thoroughly reputable and so, as it turned out, were the men. To reassure itself at the outset, however, the agency arranged for the temp to report in daily on the rig’s only telephone. For any employer whose workforce is largely female and dispersed over a wide area, the question of safety must be important. Which is why this Ameri-can-owned agency, with a network of offices throughout Britain and Ireland, responded when it heard that the Suzy Lamplugh Trust was looking for sponsorship for a new project. The trust, set up by Diana Lamplugh after the disappearance of her daughter, Suzy, an estate agent, aims to raise public awareness of the possible dangers for working women.

Among the trust’s efforts is a video, "Avoiding Danger,” which has been sponsored jointly, by Kelly and the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. Broadcaster Libby Purves points out in the video commentary that many of us regularly venture where one would be wary of sending expensive technical equipment such as a word processor. Kelly participated in the project not just because of its aims, but because it felt it had practical experience to contribute, says Julia Larsson, manager of its services department. The agency has longstanding procedures for staff safety, she says. “We never send a temporary employee to work in a hotel room or a private house or to meet a client at airports or railway stations where they would not be sure who they were meeting.”

This ruling was introduced by Kelly’s American parent company after the murder of a secretary from another agency who had been lured to a hotel by her killer. Miss Larsson believes the agency’s first line of defence against bogus employers lies in its band of account reps. “This group get to know their areas as they go out to visit customers,” she says. If anybody phoned one of them out of the blue, she would probably recognise a name she had seen while walking around the streets. “So we know if they are for real or not.” If the agency is suspicious of a caller, she says, it will wait and then ring back to check. She reckons she can spot a wrong ’un. “You develop antennae, I suppose.” A man who rang sev-

eral employment agencies after Suzy Lamplugh’s disappearance last year, and who was subsequently jailed for deception, was given short shrift by Kelly’s Ealing office, she says. Miss Larsson, who believes the dangers have probably increased during her nine years with the company, says that when she was an account rep she walked in streets where she would have

been wary of sending a temp. “There are several seedy places even in the centre of London,” she said. Some of the areas around Smithfield Market, which used to be on her patch, are not very pleasant on dark winter evenings, she says. If temps work late, the agency makes sure they take a taxi and helps with the fare.

“It’s not nice coming home late at night on public transport,” Miss Larsson says. A check call first thing in the morning of a new assignment confirms not only that a temp has arrived, but that she is happy. , Sexual harassment of employees by clients poses a delicate problem, but one that, reputable agencies cannot ignore. “I can remember temps coming to me in tears because the boss had been chasing them around the desk,” Miss Larsson says. In such cases the agency depends on the secretary reporting it. “Unless they tell us, we will never know why they have walked out of a particular job,” she says. “While you don’t want to lose a customer, you don’t want to deal with customers who cause you that sort of problem.” It is to increase awareness of dangers of all kinds that Kelly is making the Lamplugh trust video available to employees throughout the country.

ALAN ROAD, “Observer,” describes measures being taken in Britain to protect working women.