(By Louis Hyman, the author of the excellent "Debtor Nation".) Today, scholars and critics are all abuzz about “precarious” work. Instead of a job for life with General Motors or AT&T, we now have many jobs either in sequence or, increasingly, all at once. Freelancers in the US labor force are estimated to number around fifty-four million, as much as one-third of the work force.6 “Precarious” has become a catchall term that encompasses everything from day labor to temp work to the gig economy, and denotes flexible work that is insecure, temporary, and generally poorly paid. If the worker in this flexible economy is something new, so too is the firm, which, instead of hiring employees, increasingly outsources its labor needs.
Economists especially like to explain this shift to flexible labor in terms of the reduction of “transaction costs” (the costs of finding and hiring someone).7 One classic argument proposes that firms arose only because it was too expensive for individuals to transact every obligation. By that logic, the arrival of the Internet—with sites such as Craigslist and Upwork—easily explains the displacement of stable, firm-based jobs by the gig economy. But that explanation is too easy. The origins of precariousness in the rise of temp agencies and the fall of the postwar conglomerate run much deeper than the advent of digital platforms. The shape of our economy is made possible by technology, but it reflects a choice determined more by beliefs about the corporation than by lower transaction costs. Before they outsourced their labor, firms had to overcome old-fashioned shibboleths, such as secure employment for their work force, and they did so during the 1970s, long before the Internet arrived. Since 1970, temporary labor has become part of the everyday fabric of work across all segments of society, from the bottom to the top. Temps we call “day laborers” linger outside Home Depot waiting in the early morning hours for a contractor’s truck while wondering if immigration will be sweeping through. Temps called “light industrial workers” assemble electronic components for Dell or move cardboard packages for Amazon. Temps called “management consultants” fly first-class all over the world to advise CEOs on global strategy. Only the CEO, whose pay has skyrocketed relative to that of frontline workers, has remained essential. full: http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2016_Spring_Hyman.php _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
