Business Notes PERSONNEL

Many small companies find it too expensive or cumbersome to provide their employees with benefits like medical and dental insurance. Faced with that dilemma, more and more firms are discovering that the best way to take care of their employees is to let them go, then rehire them under lease. The workers are transferred to the employ of an employee-leasing agency, which sends them back to the same jobs. Because the leasing agency may have hundreds of workers, it can provide benefits like health insurance relatively cheaply. Many small-business operators are enthusiastic about the service. Says Real Provencher, whose Houston-area mail-order software firm uses ten leased workers: "The less time I have to spend worrying about bureaucracy, the more I can spend on making the business grow." Some 350 leasing companies now employ more than 120,000 American workers.