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190 Chris Bennermarket, however, is primarily related to flexible employment, not flexiblework (Masters, 1999). The growth of outsourcing and the increased use oftemporary employees severely weakens the ability of workers to bargain overtheir employment relationships, making them more vulnerable to marketdownturns and less likely to demand higher wages from their currentemployer. This is clearly evidenced in statistics on the wages of temporaryworkers, which are significantly lower than the wages of “permanent” workerswith similar educational and demographic characteristics (Barker andChristiansen, 1998; Hudson, 1999).Temporary workers also face serious problems in relation to occupationalhealth and safety issues. Their legal employer, the temporary agency, isresponsible for paying workers compensation insurance and for ensuring thesafety of the work site. The temporary agency, however, has little or no effectivecontrol over working conditions in the work sites where they place people.In one particularly poignant example in 1999, an assembly worker, who wasemployed by Manpower Temporary Services in a warehouse packing Hewlett-Packard printers, suffered respiratory problems due to poor ventilation and thecarcinogenic chemicals used in the printers’ ink cartridges. Yet, when he askedfor an air-quality check to be conducted in the warehouse, he lost his job. Hefiled a complaint with the California Industrial Relations Board, which tookmore than 20 months to determine whether there was cause to fine Hewlett-Packard or Manpower or both. Ultimately, the California Labor Commissionerruled that Manpower, as the legal employer, had violated the employee’s rightto express health safety concerns at work. In this case, however, Manpowerhad no power to order an air-safety check at the plant or to improve air-circulationsystems in the facility (Jayadev, 2000).The working conditions and employment contracts of temporary and contractemployees of all types – particularly those in service jobs such as janitors, securityguards, cafeteria workers, and landscape workers, but also to a certain extentthose working in electronic assembly plants in the region – are often primarilydetermined by the clients of their legal employers, rather than the legal employersthemselves. These client firms are frequently highly profitable, high-techcompanies, while the legal employers are frequently marginally profitable firms.Yet the institutional framework governing employment relationships currentlyprovides no mechanism for contract workers to demand better conditions fromthe client firms themselves. As contract employment relationships have proliferatedin the Valley since the mid-1980s, wages and working conditions in manyoutsourced firms have declined significantly, though the work itself has largelyremained the same (Zlolniski, 1994; Chun, 2001).While it is fairly clear, therefore, that flexible employment has increasedinequality and insecurity for workers in the region, it is much harder to understandthe impact labor market intermediaries are having on labor market