Stability Doesn’t Exist

As might be guessed from his subtitle, Hyman’s argument leans more towards the former conclusion. For him, the postwar economy that provided stable jobs never really existed — and, to the extent that it did, it’s now dead and won’t be revived.

Even if most American workers do maintain stable employment, Hyman argues, “you don’t need to replace everybody to make the rest insecure.” “Temps define the limits of what is possible in labor, casting a long shadow over the rest of the workforce.”

The typical narrative about the rise of precarious work goes something like this: After the New Deal and World War II, a booming economy, strong labor movement, and corporate commitment to strong, stable profit-making in large firms produced a golden age for the American working class. Then in the 1970s, an oil crisis and stagflation sent the economy south. Desperate to solve its profitability crisis, American capital ditched its truce with unions, opting to throttle them instead.

By the 1980s, a combination of technological change, globalization, and bareknuckle class warfare against workers egged on by Ronald Reagan led to the dismantling of much of the landscape of work as we knew it. The postwar compact between unions and capital was dead — and with it went stable, steady, well-paid work.

As those industrial jobs either went offshore or were replaced by robots, and the service sector grew massively, blue-collar workers’ entire world was upended; the same would soon be true even for college-educated, white-collar professionals, who fell victim to layoffs and “downsizing” throughout the 1990s and beyond. By the time app-based gig companies like Lyft and TaskRabbit emerged, it was too late for stable work to be saved — the forward march of technological progress was inexorable.

That narrative, according to Hyman, is incomplete in some places, wrong in others.

Work was indeed more stable during the initial postwar period — but only for white, male industrial workers, as the industries dominated by workers of color and women workers like farm and domestic work were largely left out of the labor protections of the New Deal. (While this is true, Hyman leaves out the full story, which is a bit more complicated, as historians like Harvard Sitkoff and Nelson Lichtenstein have pointed out: though these groups were excluded, New Deal-era unions did provide a framework for organizing that eventually helped put those groups on the path to fuller industrial and, in the case of African Americans, political citizenship). The work lives of people of color and many women were a harbinger of the unstable work lives that all workers would soon experience.

That process didn’t begin in the 1970s or under Reagan, however. Temp recounts how corporations began undermining steady work from the moment it emerged, at the height of postwar stable employment. Thus it can be read alongside books like Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, which recounts how the effort to dismantle the New Deal began almost as soon as it appeared. Temp dispels the myth that business ever took a break from undermining what meager protections workers had eked out.

Shifting Risk Onto Workers

Two companies in particular played key roles in the history of temp work. Manpower, one of the country’s largest temp agencies, was the pioneer in spreading the temp model first among pink-collar, then blue-collar, then white-collar workers. McKinsey, the storied business consultancy (where Hyman himself previously worked), spread the gospel of flexible, “lean” work to executives and managers from the postwar era to today.

Manpower’s origins lie in managerial incompetence. Elmer Winter, a Milwaukee attorney, needed a secretary to type a single Supreme Court brief, because he didn’t know how. He tried the city’s employment agencies for a short-term secretary assignment, but no agencies offered such assignments. Winter and his law partner decided to create a company that did.

At its birth, Hyman argues, temp work was actually framed as a way of supporting full-time work, rather than undermining it. It was also deeply gendered. Manpower encouraged the firms it first contracted with to reassure their permanent workers that the almost entirely female temp workforce was merely shoring up the permanent positions by filling necessary gaps, picking up a week here or a day there so that a full-time secretary could go on vacation or take a sick day.

In 1961, Simon and Schuster published Winter’s book A Woman’s Guide to Earning a Good Living. “Unlike the necessity of her husband’s work, a wife’s work provided the extras,” Hyman characterizes his argument. “Her work was a luxury, her income supplemental.”

But Hyman suggests this may not have been the full story. According to Manpower’s own internal surveys, the difference between the incomes of female temps and those of their permanently employed husbands wasn’t that large, suggesting that “the work was not as discretionary as the women might have liked to say it was.” White male industrial workers, the supposed kings of the postwar working-class order, weren’t well-paid enough to avoid having their wives put in time temping.

In the early sixties, before the takeoff of feminism’s second wave, Manpower had to figure out how to encourage women to join the workforce without upsetting patriarchal relations. “Justifying women’s work without undermining male authority was Winter’s true genius,” Hyman writes. In a promotional pamphlet for Manpower aimed at recruiting women temps, the company offered strategies for wives seeking to reassure husbands that their breadwinner status was firmly intact despite the wife’s going off to work.

In his attempts to secure low-wage female labor, Winter even made nods in the direction of feminist Betty Friedan — with a boss’s twist: “Work was the best cure for ‘housewifitis.’” Winter’s answer to the “problem that has no name” was for women to work low-wage jobs with little possibility for advancement or stability.

Yet despite Manpower’s introduction of precarious temp work, the era still represented the height of steady work and stable corporate practice. This was reflected in John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1967 book The New Industrial State, in which the economist articulated the postwar corporate ideal of large, vertically integrated firms engaged in slow, steady, boring profit-making.

Their focus was on “minimizing risk,” not maximizing profits. But at the very moment Galbraith was articulating this ideal, executives at Manpower and McKinsey were designing and implementing a corporate model that eschewed stable progress for immediate profits.

Central to that shift would be the emphasis on what Hyman calls “leanness instead of stability,” beginning in the 1970s and taking off through the 1980s and beyond. Long-term, well-compensated work was a barrier to getting there. “Safe workers were unproductive workers,” Hyman writes.

If nothing else, lean companies were intent on wringing massive gains in productivity out of their workers — and temps, whether used as threats, test variables whose workday achievements would be compared against those of permanent workers, or direct replacements — would be used to wring that productivity out of the workforce.

This produced a “fundamental intellectual step” toward a “blended workforce of external and internal employees.” Temps were now permanent. And plenty of twenty-first-century companies would be happy to exploit this shift, from new “digital economy” companies like Uber to far older ones like FedEx, both of which do their best to minimize responsibility for their workers’ well-being, avoiding liabilities for benefits like pensions or health care as well as potential unionization efforts by classifying them as “independent contractors” rather than full-time workers.

Hyman’s history of attempts to dismantle steady work is wide-ranging, spanning American and global economic history since World War II and journeying everywhere from the C-suite offices of the global economy’s most powerful corporations to dirt-floored huts where immigrant workers are paid piece rates assembling electronics.

But his prescriptions leave much to be desired — especially if we have reason to doubt his claim, near the book’s conclusion, that “all the new jobs are in the flexible economy.”

Don’t Cede Another Inch

Thankfully, Hyman does not conclude with a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps call for American workers to get used to the cold, hard realities of the twenty-first-century economy. He emphasizes that the miserable state of the American worker today is the result of choices made by corporate America and politicians, not the unchangeable result of technological advance, and that we could choose an alternative. And his proposals include an overhaul of labor law that reflects the supposed reality of the flexible workforce today, as well as a portable set of benefits like health care and a universal basic income for all workers.

But where will the impetus for such benefits, especially robust ones that actually meet workers’ needs, come from? Certainly not the goodwill of corporations looking to save workers from the cruelties of the temp labor force.

You won’t see a broad front of Fortune 500 corporations fighting for a Bernie Sanders-style robust, universal, free public health system, for the same reason Manpower’s temp model didn’t produce a new worker freed from the drudgery of decades-long jobs: a lack of basic welfare-state protections like public health care is a boon for corporate power on the whole.

And, most importantly, if the economy isn’t temp-ifying at warp speed, maybe we don’t “need to stop fixating on propping up a world of security that is tied to a job,” as Hyman urges us to do in his conclusion. Foregoing the battle over who qualifies as a permanent worker rather than a temp or freelancer could easily (and unnecessarily) play into the hands of companies that should be legally compelled to treat their workers as employees rather than independent contractors. And if those employees should be considered permanent workers, they are entitled to a suite of severely weakened but still-crucial rights to collective action on the job with their coworkers, including the right to organize unions.

Hyman mentions the illegal factory occupations and other militant worker upsurges of the 1930s as the catalyst for winning New Deal labor protections. But his prescriptions fail to acknowledge that similar upsurges might be an essential part of the cure for what ails workers today. If the real problem of the twenty-first-century workforce isn’t precarity but low wages and nonexistent benefits, maybe old-fashioned, pre-sharing-economy tactics like strikes are the best way for workers themselves to cure what ails them, rather than embracing the end of stable work as we know it.