Fluent Essays

1.Read + Find/Summarize an ArticleFor this Discussion, please begin by reading at least 3 of the following popular articles, all of which are related (either directly or indirectly) to the theme of our course:—this Pacific Standard (Links to an external site.) article on the causes of the decline of labor unions in the US;—this New York Review of Books (Links to an external site.) article on delivery Apps and delivery workers;—this Pew Research Center (Links to an external site.) article on the decline of manufacturing jobs in the US (even as productivity/output has grown);—this Science Magazine (Links to an external site.) article about university graduate students attempts to unionize;—this VOX (Links to an external site.) article about the new California law, AB 5 (you might also check out this even more recent Tech Crunch (Links to an external site.) article about the response to AB 5 from Uber and Postmates);—this essay (Links to an external site.) by Jason Smith in the Brooklyn Rail about the history of automation.Once youve read these articles, choose something from one of them that stood out or interested you. This could be a keyword from the article, a problem the article discussed, a policy or law that was mentioned, a court case...anything. Next, plug this keyword, term, or phrase into Google and find a different popular article—i.e., an article from a source like the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, the LA Times, the Guardian, NPR, etc.—that deals with this keyword or a related subject. Read the article and then write a brief, 6-8 sentence summary of it. Make sure that you describe the central problem that your article addresses as clearly as possible! Then post the link to the article as well as your summary below.(If you read the articles above and would prefer to explore/research something else—i.e., a key word that sparked your interest during our class meetings, or one of the Vocabulary terms, or something from the chapters of Temp that weve read—go for it! The important thing is that you start exploring problems related to the theme of our course.)2. Chapter SynopsesFor each chapter of Temp that we read over the weekend—i.e., Chapters 1, 2, and 3—please write a brief, 200-250 word synopsis. You might consider answering the following questions: What are the main historical events that Hyman discusses in the chapter? What is the chapters main theme? Does Hyman write about any problems that you find interesting or that seem worth exploring further? What seems to be each chapters main argument, and how does this argument relate to the argument of the book as a whole?My advice is to treat these synopses both as a helpful way to remember what takes place in each chapter of Temp and as a way to begin thinking about the kinds of questions you might want to address in your Contexts Project....3. vocabularyPlease write 2-3 sentences in which you define the 10 terms, laws, policies, practices, institutions, and historical movements/moments/processes listed below. Please do not simply copy-and-paste the first few sentences of the Wikipedia article (though Wikipedia might be where you start your research). Try to go deeper. What is the most important thing for you to understand about these terms? How do they relate to Hymans argument in Temp? For the historical terms, do they point toward a pressing political/social/economic problem that exists in the present? If so, which one(s)?As with Vocabulary I , the point of this assignment is to begin building a vocabulary so that we can understand the context for the argument that Hyman is making in Temp. The more fully you understand these terms now, the easier the reading (and your research, too) will become!1) Wage Stagnation in the U.S.2) M-Form Corporation (Multidivisional Corporation)3) Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 19334) United Auto Workers strike (1936 and 2019!)5) AB 5 (new California law)6) Bracero Program7) Taft-Hartley Act of 19478) Fight for $15 Movement9) Jobless Recoveries10) Universal Basic Income temp_the_real_story_of_what_happened_to_your_salary__benefits__and_job_security.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Praise for Temp “How employers learned to prefer disposable workers without rights for nearly every job could be the subtitle of this stark yet engaging tale. Louis Hyman names the culprits, too: entrepreneurs and consultants who taught corporations to chuck obligations to the people on whom they depend. Companies were able to experiment freely on those left out of the New Deal social contract, turning the vulnerability of some into today’s insecurity and anxiety for all. If the sunny ending sounds like whistling in the graveyard, no matter: this book is a stimulus to start imagining a sustainable economic order for our time.” —Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains “A fascinating journey through the changing nature of work.” —Forbes “In this persuasive and richly detailed history, Hyman traces a decades-long campaign to eliminate salaried positions and replace them with contract work.” —The Nation “Illuminating and often surprising . . . A book that encourages us to imagine a future that is inclusive and humane rather than sentimentalize a past that never truly was.” —The New York Times “Hyman looks at the reasons behind the temporary nature of so much of the American economy. . . . [He] examines the changes in American corporate life after the 1950s and 1960s, and why the much-mythologized postwar years were less rosy than we think.” —Slate “Temp covers a century of economic history in which a dismal dynamic emerges.” —Los Angeles Review of Books 1 “Hyman’s examination of the evolution of work is thorough, thoughtful, and sympathetic, importantly not excluding the people —immigrants, minorities, women, and youth—largely ignored in the ‘American Dream’ model for employment once all but guaranteed to white men.” —Publishers Weekly “A revealing study of the ‘gig economy,’ which, though it seems new, has long antecedents . . . [and] a quietly hopeful spin on an economic process that has proved tremendously dislocating for a generation and more of workers.” —Kirkus Reviews “Hyman charts the decades-long rise of our automation-fueled ‘ad-hocracy’ through the companies that helped create it, from the early days of GM to Upwork and Uber today. . . . The book succeeds as a synthesis of economics, sociology, and history by opting for good storytelling over jargon.” —Booklist “Countering common wisdom, Louis Hyman shows that the norm of steady work has been eroded for decades not by the workings of an abstract market but through the systematic efforts of management consultants and temporary work agencies. Like it or hate it, the gig economy has a history that Hyman masterfully reveals.” —Joshua B. Freeman, author of Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World “Louis Hyman weaves a tapestry of unlikely people and events: an orphaned electrician working nights, McKinsey consultants stalking the hallways, undocumented women assembling electronics in kitchens, dexterous robots, disgruntled saboteurs, and INS raids. And yet Temp is about our future. This is a crucial book for our time—it is insightful, surprising, and deeply humane.” —Kevin Birmingham, author of The Most Dangerous Book 2 “Temp is a riveting read for anyone grappling with the contradictions and inequities of contemporary capitalism. Louis Hyman simultaneously shows us the decades-long evolution of the present epidemic of job insecurity, takes a clear-eyed look at the exploitation of women and workers of color, and outlines a positive vision of how Americans can prosper in both work and life.” —Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of New America “In this marvelously insightful study of the revolution now convulsing the world of work, Louis Hyman demonstrates that management-consulting firms like McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group rationalize and propagandize for a business system in which insecurity and inequality have become a new normal.” —Nelson Lichtenstein, author of The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business “Louis Hyman’s Temp takes us on a historical deep dive into how U.S. jobs have developed over time, so that we can better understand where they are headed. Whether you are cheered by or wary of the advent of gig and nontraditional work arrangements, this book offers a new lens to see how we reached this point. As the largest and most complex market in the country, the labor market affects all our lives. Its practices and outcomes govern whether we are secure, well-paid, safe, proud, and interested in our work—or not.” —Erica Groshen, former commissioner, Bureau of Labor Statistics 3 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Louis Hyman is an associate professor of economic history at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) at Cornell University and serves as the director of ILR’s Institute for Workplace Studies in New York City. A former Fulbright scholar and McKinsey consultant, Hyman received his PhD in American history from Harvard University. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Bloomberg, Pacific Standard, Wilson Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the author of Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink and Borrow: The American Way of Debt. 4 Also by Louis Hyman Shopping for Change, with Joseph Tohill American Capitalism: A Reader, with Edward E. Baptist Borrow Debtor Nation 5 6 PENGUIN BOOKS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018 Published in Penguin Books 2019 Copyright © 2018 by Louis Hyman Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. ISBN 9780735224087 (paperback) THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Names: Hyman, Louis, 1977- author. Title: Temp : How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary / Louis Hyman. Description: New York : Viking, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018025161 (print) | LCCN 2018026796 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735224094 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735224070 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Temporary employment—United States—History. | Labor market—United States—History. | Job security—United States—History. | Labor —United States—History. Classification: LCC HD5854.2.U6 (ebook) | LCC HD5854.2.U6 H96 2018 (print) | DDC 331.25/729—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025161 While the author has made every effort to provide accurate internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Version_3 7 For Kate 8 Somebody must do the work and it might as well be you. —ELMER WINTER 9 CONTENTS PRAISE FOR TEMP ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALSO BY LOUIS HYMAN TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION EPIGRAPH INTRODUCTION How We All Became Temps CHAPTER ONE Making Company Men CHAPTER TWO Temporary Women CHAPTER THREE Consulting Men CHAPTER FOUR Marginal Men CHAPTER FIVE Temporary Business CHAPTER SIX 10 Office Automation and Technology Consulting CHAPTER SEVEN The Fall of the American Corporation CHAPTER EIGHT Rethinking the Corporation CHAPTER NINE Office of the Future, Factory of the Past CHAPTER TEN Restructuring the American Dream CHAPTER ELEVEN Permatemp CHAPTER TWELVE Flexible Labor in the Digital Age CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Second Industrious Revolution ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX 11 INTRODUCTION How We All Became Temps D uring the worst recession since the Great Depression, Elmer Winter gave a speech condemning the complacency of American businessmen. Winter was the president of Manpower Inc., a temporary labor agency, but also one of America’s largest employers. He delivered his speech as a call to arms—a plea for nothing less than to save the country itself. Winter fixed on “deadly fears of the future” as a theme— developments Americans believed would undermine their economic safety. Some of these fears came from abroad, like Chinese twenty-five-cents-an-hour labor or Russia’s ever subtle global diplomacy. Most of Winter’s fears, however, were about America itself, about the disconnect between our hopes and our realities. “Foremost in the thinking of every man and woman who works is the basic question,” Winter said, “‘How secure is my job?’” The hope of the man on the street today in America, he told the shareholders, is “a good job—good health and security—for himself and for his family.”1 Ever the realist, Winter told the businessmen that this dream of economic security, in the form of a steady, well-paid job, would no longer be possible. He told them that the “old days are gone . . . and plans must be the order of the day.” Winter’s vision was to bring down costs, especially labor costs, by providing a flexible workforce without job guarantees, buttressed by new automation technology. American business would need to work smarter and harder to overcome the hue and cry that “we can’t compete with foreign products where our labor rates are three or four times higher than theirs.” Manpower, and other temporary agencies like them, would provide that labor. 12 Winter’s speech—you might be surprised to learn—was delivered not in 2008, but in 1958. He gave it in the first brief downturn of the postwar economy. The end of American job security was not in the past, but still in the future. His prognostications came true, partially because he—and others like him—believed them so zealously and worked so hard to bring them about. The rise of our flexible economy—how we all, to some degree, have had to come to terms with the withering of the postwar job—is not just the story of Elmer Winter. His company, Manpower Inc.—the first major temporary agency, which in 2017 still employed more than 3 million people or 50 percent more than Wal-Mart—would play an important role in transforming the world of work from one of security to insecurity, but it would not be alone.2 This transformation was not a conspiracy, but was carried out in public to much acclaim. Presidents, CEOs, and stock markets the world over celebrated the dismantling of the postwar prosperity. Most people kept their jobs, but 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. Beginning in the midst of the postwar boom in the 1950s, American jobs were slowly remade from top to bottom: consultants supplanted executives at the top, temps replaced office workers in the middle, and day laborers pushed out union workers at the bottom. On every step of the ladder, work would become more insecure as it became more flexible. This new economic arrangement produced opportunities and wealth for those at the top, but for most people, flexibility produced economic uncertainty. For some of the new temps, like consultants, the work is glamorous and lucrative. For others, like office workers, it is a dead end. For those day laborers waiting outside Home Depot, it is work with little pay and much danger. Despite pay gaps, education gaps, and citizenship gaps, temps have come to define our workplaces today in ways that Mad Men– era secretarial temps—white gloved and beautiful—never could have imagined. Temp is the history of this transformation, of how the postwar world, which to our eyes worked so well, came undone neither by economic accident nor by technological inevitability, but by human choice. 13 Many of us who came of age in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s expected those postwar days to return. We believed that whatever the recession that Winter—or Carter, or Reagan, or Clinton—had been addressing, it was only temporary. The good years, the permanent onward progress of prosperity, would surely return. For most Americans, they have not. Where did all the good jobs go? The answer goes deeper than Uber and further back than downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our economy and our businesses work. 14 The Rise and Fall of the Postwar Economy A postwar world of work and business that brought two generations of unprecedented prosperity came to an end in the 1970s, and in its stead a new era of wage stagnation and income inequality began—though it was hard at first to see that this change was permanent. For a while, the wage problem was hidden, first by more women entering the workforce (raising household income) and then by rising house prices (raising household equity). But in the collapse of 2008, we all suddenly became aware that while the economy had grown for forty years, the 10 percent at the top received 87 percent of all that growth (compared with 29 percent from 1933 to 1973).3 The muchmaligned 1 percent alone received 56 percent of all the growth from 1975 to 2006. In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, we discovered that our society not only was unequal, but also had been becoming steadily more so for a long time. Instead of progress, we had been in decline (at least if you were not in the 1 percent). In 2018, despite a booming stock market, we are still wrestling with the aftershocks of that recession, but the real roots of today’s insecurity go much deeper than credit default swaps and underwater mortgages. Temporary labor and flexible corporations first emerged when that hard-won dream—job security—appeared to be the inevitable and happy result of a mature capitalism. The foundations of job security were, as the leading postwar economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, believed, in the risk aversion of the postwar corporation. In his best-selling 1967 exegesis of the American corporation, The New Industrial State, Galbraith explained that the modern corporation was defined by risk minimization, not profit maximization. The investments required for manufacturing in the postwar economy required sums of capital (and an investment of time) unseen before. The first Model T may have been produced with an investment of a few tens of thousands of dollars, but a Mustang factory of the 1960s cost millions. World War I–era planes could be brought from blueprint to battle in only a few months, but by the ’60s, just the design of jet planes took years. To actually build a jet factory took that much longer. Executives 15 planned for long time horizons, eschewing short-term opportunities for long-term gain. This dull steadiness produced unrivaled economic progress, both in terms of GDP and technology. In the 1950s, U.S. real GDP growth rates hit as high as 8.7 percent a year—as fast as China’s today. None of the top one hundred corporations failed to earn a profit in the postwar period. Long-term investment in corporate science made this growth possible. Products were not just incremental novelties, but truly disruptive technologies. In these labs, the Bells, the Polaroids, the Lockheeds, and the Xeroxes launched the digital revolution. This was when American scientists invented plastics, transistors, computers, jets, fiber optics, computer networks, cell phones, and nearly every other technological marvel that still defines our world today (and that most of us think were invented very recently). Corporations invested in manufacturing, in research and development, and most important, in employees. Well-paid workers, meanwhile, could buy American products without borrowing too much. With steady profits and a long-term vision, corporations could focus on real progress. Firms needed to know that the workers would, in turn, show up. The strategies of corporations required stability not just for their investments, but for their employees, and by extension for all of American life. Paper pushers of the middle class could count on their jobs as their families grew. Working stiffs knew the plant would be open the next year and that their industrial union would get them a raise, but not a revolution. An unwavering workforce was needed if investments in heavy manufacturing were to pay out. The jobs might have been repetitive, but so were the paychecks. Capitalism worked for nearly everyone. For the first time, inequality fell and growth accelerated. Policy makers, corporate planners, and labor leaders fashioned a world after World War II that promoted security not only for the elite—and their investments—but for nearly everybody. This investment certainty was in part possible because of the unusual politics of Cold War Keynesianism, which appeared to have transformed capitalism’s periodic crises into unending expansion. Lucrative defense contracts with fixed rates of profit swelled to make up a third of the GDP. Government services accounted for another fifth. Although nuclear brinkmanship was 16 terrifying, the economy, at least in the U.S. and the West, was oddly calm. The Bretton Woods order, centered on the U.S. dollar, produced a twenty-five-year run of prosperity. Consumer purchasing power rose every year since World War II. But the true certainty came from the technological progress made possible by these political arrangements, not just the odd alignment of global politics. It was a broad commitment to steady progress, not disruptive wealth creation, that turned all that cutting-edge science into new industries. Galbraith may have been right about the postwar corporation, but he was wrong about the future of capitalism. Around 1970, we decided to go in a completely different direction. Elmer Winter was not the only one advocating for another vision of the American workforce, and this vision—supported by economists, but more important, by business leaders and their paid consultants—began to focus on leanness instead of stability. The postwar institutions—big unions, big corporations, powerful regulators—that insulated us from volatility and made possible the steady economic growth and broad equality of the postwar era were swept aside in the name of resurgent faith in the “market.” This transformation was not a conspiracy of a few, but a consensus of the many. At the top, the risk-taking entrepreneur supplanted the risk-averse, but loyal, company man as the capitalist ideal. Risk became sought after because it was increasingly seen as the way to maximize profits. Without risk, the new portfolio theorists chided, there could be no return. The right way to view a corporation, economists and consultants told business leaders, was to see a firm not as something that produced valuable goods and services but as a way to make money. Managers began to hop from firm to firm, focusing less on climbing the ladder (i.e., investing for the long term) than on garnering the biggest bonuses. Even for founders, getting acquired, rather than building a firm, became the new goal. No one at the top was committed to the long haul, so why would they be committed to job security for anyone else? These market fundamentalists believed their own hype and turned their backs on the ideas and institutions that had made the postwar boom a reality. The key features of the postwar corporation—stable workforce, retained earnings, and minimized risk—became liabilities rather 17 than assets. The American corporation was take ... Purchase answer to see full attachment