Temp

Description

Winner of the William G. Bowen Prize
Named a “Triumph” of 2018 by New York Times Book Critics
Shortlisted for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award

The untold history of the surprising origins of the “gig economy”–how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of millions of working men and women in postwar America.

Over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the institutions that insulated us from volatility have been swept aside by a fervent belief in the market. Now every working person in America today asks the same question: how secure is my job? In Temp, Louis Hyman explains how we got to this precarious position and traces the real origins of the gig economy: it was created not by accident, but by choice through a series of deliberate decisions by consultants and CEOs–long before the digital revolution.

Uber is not the cause of insecurity and inequality in our country, and neither is the rest of the gig economy. The answer to our growing problems goes deeper than apps, further back than outsourcing and downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our businesses should work. As we make choices about the future, we need to understand our past.”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
 
“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

“A fascinating journey through changing nature of work.”—Forbes

“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 dispels the myth that business ever took a break from undermining what meager protections workers had eked out.”—Jacobin

“Temp covers a century of economic history in which a dismal dynamic emerges…Hyman’s history is incisive when it comes to Silicon Valley’s questionable labor practices.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“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

“How employers learned to prefer disposable workers without rights for nearly everyjob 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

“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, spreading the gospel of flexibility and cheap labor. 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, braceros and divorcées, McKinsey consultants stalking the hallways, undocumented women assembling electronics in kitchens, virtual receptionists, 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

“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 are truly the organic intellectuals of contemporary capitalism.  They rationalize and propagandize for a business system in which insecurity and inequality have become a new normal encompassing everything from the most familiar big box store to the exotic worksites of Silicon Valley.”—Nelson Lichtenstein, author of The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business
 
“Louis Hyman’s Temp takes us on an historical deep dive into how US 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. Temp engagingly and authoritatively reviews the last century of managerial strategy, workplace regulation, and technological change, and offers insight into job-related challenges we will face in the years ahead.”—Erica Groshen, former commissioner Bureau of Labor Statistics
Louis Hyman is an associate professor of economic history at the Industrial Labor Relations School of Cornell University, as well 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.

How We All Became Temps

During 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.”

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 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.

Winter’s speech—youmight 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 over three 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 bealone. 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 in the ladder, work would become more insecure as it became more flexible.

For some at the top, this new economic arrangement produced great opportunities and wealth, 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 andmuch 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-glovedand 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.

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, further back than downsizing, andcontests the most essential assumptions we have about how our economy and our businesses work.

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 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 to 29 percent from 1933 to 1973). The much-maligned 1 percent 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 was not only unequal, but 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 as 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 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 hitas 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 where 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 have been invented very recently). Corporations invested in manufacturing, in research and development, and most importantly, 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 the investments in heavy manufacturing were to payout. 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 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 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 importantly 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 in the long term) than 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 made the postwar booma reality.

The key features of the postwar corporation—stable workforce, retained earnings, and minimized risk—became liabilities rather than assets. The American corporation was taken in a more financial direction, abandoning thirty years of manufacturing success. In the place of long-term investment and stable work forces, the new ideal for American firms was short-term returnsand flexible labor. The elements of this reorientation that promoted and made possible this temporary transformation—consultants, temps, daylaborers—emerged from different places and for different reasons, but as their ideas, practices, and institutions interwove, they remade the corporation—and America.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.8000 × 5.4600 × 8.3900 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780735224087
ISBN-10	0735224080
Author	Louis Hyman
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BUS038000, HIS036060
Subjects	history teacher gifts, macroeconomics, American history books, BUS038000, business books, history gifts, united states history, gifts for history buffs, historical books, history buff gifts, gig economy, democratic socialism, labor history, unemployment, labor economics, minimum wage, consulting, louis hyman, temp, biographies, gifts for dad, HIS036060, business, american history, American, economics, economy, history books, apps, history, strategy, retirement, money, corporations, economics books, history buff, big business, us history