How the ‘Temp’ Economy Became the New Normal

There’s nothing like political and economic upheaval to make boredom look good. An era like the 1950s, which used to be lampooned for its stifling conformity — all those organization men in their gray flannel suits — has since been revered for its stability. To the gig-economy worker who has no idea how many hours she’ll be putting in next week (much less whether she’ll make enough to pay her rent or her health insurance), the prospect of donning a fedora, taking the commuter train into the city, sitting at a desk from 9 to 5 while her ample pension benefits accrue — well, it sounds like a fantasy now.

Then again, it would have been a fantasy for her back then, too. As Louis Hyman shows in his illuminating and often surprising new book, the midcentury idyll of steady employment and a regular paycheck wasn’t designed to include women and people of color. For them, today’s economic precariousness wouldn’t look entirely unfamiliar. The New Deal’s fair labor standards applied only to industrial jobs in factories and offices; agricultural and domestic work were deliberately excluded.

“These different protections were rooted in assumptions about whose work needed to be secure — and who had power in society,” Hyman writes in “Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary.” “White men’s work counted. Everybody else’s did not.”

A number of books have been published in recent years about the brave new gig economy, but “Temp” examines the underlying cultural shift that made it all possible. An astounding 94 percent of American jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were for “alternative work.” Slow and steady growth used to be a cardinal virtue for the big American corporation. Now leanness and flexibility are prized, and nobody is spared. “In the end,” Hyman writes, “even white men were not protected from this new reality.”

Hyman, a labor historian at Cornell, argues that the common explanation for what happened — mainly, that our current dispensation was foisted on us by technological and economic change — is self-serving and inadequate. He says that human choice, including a palpable shift in values, played an essential role. “Temp” traces how, for corporations and government policymakers alike, “the risk-taking entrepreneur supplanted the risk-averse, but loyal, company man as the capitalist ideal.”

To that end, Hyman homes in on two businesses in particular: Manpower, the temporary staffing agency, and McKinsey, the management consulting company. In his telling, they acted like a vise, with one supplying the labor and the other supplying the ideology; together they helped squeeze the American workforce into its current shape.

The material they had to work with was the postwar American corporation, which tended to be lumbering and cautious. After the convulsions of the Great Depression, Americans longed for predictability. Franklin Roosevelt created the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, which demanded that publicly traded corporations open their books to enable government oversight. Heavy manufacturing entailed enormous investments in machinery, which required every worker along the assembly line to show up, so that those expensive machines wouldn’t sit idle. Corporations couldn’t abide too much volatility. They sought to minimize risks rather than maximize profits.

Corporate paternalism might have been born from self-interest, but it helped to create a culture that was hard to shake loose. The assumption that the corporation had a responsibility to its workers proved to be exceptionally stubborn — especially when employee rights were enshrined in union contracts. Even Elmer Winter, the founder of Manpower, originally pitched his company’s services as “emergency support,” filling in when an employee was sick or on vacation. “Permanent, full-time jobs were the norm, and Winter did not want to change that — at first,” Hyman writes, rather ominously.

But then those permanent, full-time employees were expensive, and temps were comparatively cheap. There could be beauty in their contingency; you didn’t have to pay them benefits or overtime, and their numbers could be quietly shed in a downturn without announcing embarrassing layoffs. Eventually, “rather than protecting the core workers, Manpower enabled them to be fired.” Hyman dates the beginning of this shift to the late 1960s, a time of stagnating profits. Cutting costs was easier than increasing revenues, and executives chose accordingly. Outsourcing certain functions to temporary or contract workers is now so commonplace it almost seems like part of the natural order, but back then, Hyman says, it was strange enough that it had to be learned.

For skittish executives, McKinsey consultants were there to help. Not only could consultants shoulder the blame when a corporation announced plans to restructure, but they also brought with them a worldview shaped by their own experiences as McKinsey “associates,” subject to the up-or-out policy of an “unforgiving meritocracy.”

As a former McKinsey consultant himself, Hyman likens associates to highly paid temps. They were indoctrinated to believe that “insecurity” was a goad for “excellence.” “A brutal lifestyle became a filter for becoming a successful consultant,” he writes, recalling colleagues who sacrificed their marriages and family lives in the process. “The people who reorganized corporations, by this filter, had little respect for stability.”

“Temp” also includes sections about U.S. immigration law, towel-folding robots and unauthorized immigrant women in Silicon Valley assembling circuitboards with their fingernails. Hyman is a lucid stylist who usually manages to write his way through the deluge, but sometimes the information can feel like too much all at once.

This sounds pretty fanciful, coming precisely at a time when Republicans in Congress seem determined to cut whatever threads of the safety net are left. I prefer Hyman when he gets out of wonk-mode and tells us what is really at stake: “The point is not to be better robots than robots, but to have more human work than our ancestors — creative, caring, curious.” This might sound fanciful, too, but at least it’s an attempt to understand what work is and what it can be. Here, finally, is a book that encourages us to imagine a future that is inclusive and humane rather than sentimentalize a past that never truly was.

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Publication Notes:

“Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary”

By Louis Hyman

388 pages. Viking. $28.