Erin Hatton, a sociologist at SUNY Buffalo, wrote an "opinion" piece for the New York Times called The Rise Of The Permanent Temp Economy. It's worth reading, although I must note that this article does not contain a single link to any source (including the Times) which the reader might follow to learn more about the subjects discussed.
Remind me again—why does the internet exist?
That irritation aside, the article is likely a condensed version of Hatton's book, called The Temp Economy — From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America. I'll reprint an excerpt, and you can read the rest in the New York Times (if you jump through enough hoops).
Politicians across the political spectrum herald “job creation,” but frightfully few of them talk about what kinds of jobs are being created. Yet this clearly matters: According to the Census Bureau, one-third of adults who live in poverty are working but do not earn enough to support themselves and their families.
A quarter of jobs in America pay below the federal poverty line for a family of four ($23,050). Not only are many jobs low-wage, they are also temporary and insecure. Over the last three years, the temp industry added more jobs in the United States than any other, according to the American Staffing Association, the trade group representing temp recruitment agencies, outsourcing specialists and the like.
Low-wage, temporary jobs have become so widespread that they threaten to become the norm. But for some reason this isn’t causing a scandal. At least in the business press, we are more likely to hear plaudits for “lean and mean” companies than angst about the changing nature of work for ordinary Americans.
How did we arrive at this state of affairs?
Good question! And why isn't this causing a scandal?
Many argue that it was the inevitable result of macroeconomic forces — globalization, deindustrialization and technological change — beyond our political control. Yet employers had (and have) choices. Rather than squeezing workers, they could have invested in workers and boosted product quality, taking what economists call the high road toward more advanced manufacturing and skilled service work. But this hasn’t happened.
Instead, American employers have generally taken the low road: lowering wages and cutting benefits, converting permanent employees into part-time and contingent workers, busting unions and subcontracting and outsourcing jobs. They have done so, in part, because of the extraordinary evangelizing of the temp industry, which rose from humble origins to become a global behemoth.
The story begins in the years after World War II, when a handful of temp agencies were started, largely in the Midwest. In 1947, William Russell Kelly founded Russell Kelly Office Service (later known as Kelly Girl Services) in Detroit, with three employees, 12 customers and $848 in sales. A year later, two lawyers, Aaron Scheinfeld and Elmer Winter, founded a similarly small outfit, Manpower Inc., in Milwaukee. At the time, the future of these fledgling agencies was no foregone conclusion. Unions were at the peak of their power, and the protections that they had fought so hard to achieve — workers’ compensation, pensions, health benefits and more — had been adopted by union and nonunion employers alike.
But temp leaders were creating a new category of work (and workers) that would be exempt from such protections.
To avoid union opposition, they developed a clever strategy, casting temp work as “women’s work,” and advertising thousands of images of young, white, middle-class women doing a variety of short-term office jobs. The Kelly Girls, Manpower’s White Glove Girls, Western Girl’s Cowgirls, the American Girls of American Girl Services and numerous other such “girls” appeared in the pages of Newsweek, Business Week, U.S. News & World Report, Good Housekeeping, Fortune, The New York Times and The Chicago Daily Tribune. In 1961 alone, Manpower spent $1 million to put its White Glove Girls in the Sunday issue of big city newspapers across the country.
The strategy was an extraordinary success...
Yes, American employers have generally taken "the low road" regarding their workers.
Gee, I wonder why?
With all due respect for vultures, there is no better word to label the "employers" and associated parasitical employment agencies who are taking advantage of the desperate by offering non-permanent "jobs" for measly pay, no benefits and no rights.
It's a return to serfdom. History tells us that serfs were compensated with just enough reward (usually thin rations and rudimentary lodging) to ensure they could perform the daily hard labor required by the overlord. Hitler's gang of thugs utilized the same logic in the concentration camps, for those "lucky" enough not to be instantly exterminated.
In essence, serfdom is an aspect of Darwinian survival, so we should not be surprised that after a fleeting interlude called the Enlightenment, Homo unsapiens is reverting to normal patterns of unvarnished abuse and exploitation of the masses by the privileged class, the latter whom are nothing more than the latest generation of psychopathic thieves and plunderers also known as Alpha males.
To quote Monty Python, I fart in their general direction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWBUl7oT9sA
Posted by: Oliver | 01/31/2013 at 11:10 AM