AGREEMENT GIVES JOB SEEKERS TEMP OPTIONS.

Byline: Louis Uchitelle The New York Times

America's largest job-finding company for laid-off white-collar workers has reached an agreement to channel such workers - particularly upper-level managers, engineers, accountants, lawyers, bankers and the like - into temporary work when it cannot place them in permanent, well-paying jobs.

The unusual agreement, made public Wednesday, is between Drake Beam Morin Inc., the job-finding, or outplacement, company, and Manpower Inc., the nation's largest temporary-help company. It reflects the explosive worldwide growth in temporary employment and also the growing reluctance of Corporate America to pay the cost of keeping former top-level employees in outplacement firms long enough to land good jobs.

``The traditional support for individuals who had been earning above $50,000 was unlimited five years ago,'' said Drake Beam President Charles Albrecht, who said most upper-level people once received more than a year of severance pay from their old companies as well as a year or more of support at an outplacement firm. ``Now nearly half are here for only three months and their severance has shrunk. So there are individuals who need help while they are with us job hunting, and temporary work feeds that need.''

For Manpower, the arrangement with Drake Beam provides - almost overnight - a huge new supply of highly skilled workers to feed a growing demand for such people to take temporary jobs, not only in the United States but increasingly abroad. For Drake Beam, the agreement would satisfy corporate clients who want to see their laid-off workers re-employed as quickly as possible.

Both organizations operate in more than two dozen countries. And Manpower in particular is facing stiff competition from European temporary-help companies that are expanding rapidly, responding to a growing demand for ``flexible workers,'' which means day work or short-term contracts.

Such work, once concentrated among blue-collar and clerical people, has spread up the income ladder so that it is not unusual today for a company to hire an engineer to carry out a six-month project, or accountants during the income tax season, or even temporary executives.

The agreement between Drake Beam and Manpower, a first for either industry, appears likely to focus attention on one aspect of the election-year debate over the downsizing phenomenon: Are white-collar workers laid off from well-paying jobs having trouble finding comparable work that pays as well?

Many economists, and members of the Clinton administration, have argued that the economy is creating well-paying permanent jobs. But Drake Beam and Manpower, in working together, suggest that laid-off workers are becoming more willing to take temporary work, either because they cannot find a new job fast enough or before their severance pay runs out.

But while Albrecht of Drake Beam, which is based in New York, insists that temporary work is becoming a necessary compromise for laid-off workers, its chief rival, Right Management Consultants, a Philadelphia-based company, criticized the concept of outplacement firms and temporary-help agencies working together.

``The whole idea of outplacement is to help people realize that they can find similar or better positions in a reasonable amount of time, within a year, and they don't have to fall back on an inferior assignment,'' said Nancy Geffner, a Right Management executive. ``If you interrupt this process by taking a temporary job, you lose the momentum of seeking a new career. This agreement is going to set people up for failure.''

Albrecht and Manpower chairman Mitchell Fromstein said the agreement would become effective once final details were worked out. Their arrangement involves no exchange of money, the goal of both organizations being to step up job placement.