The national accounts break down employee numbers by business sector. Temporary workers, employees of temporary employment agencies, are allocated to the corresponding sector. Apparent labour productivity in an industrial sector, calculated as the sector's value-added per (permanent) employee hence does not include the staff numbers and value-added corre-sponding to temporary workers involved in the production process. This ratio is therefore sensitive to how industrial firms manage their human resources, to a more or less intense use of temporary work. It is possible to construct an apparent labour productivity indicator for industrial sectors that does not have this drawback by redistributing temporary employment among the productivity indicators of temp user industrial sectors (value-added as the numerator and employee numbers as the denominator). At business sector level, the new indicator differs from the classic indicator, not just in level, but above all in terms of its growth rate. This shows how important it is not to over-look the effect that growth in temporary employment in the second half of the 1990s can have on certain indus-trial sector indicators.