The Disposable Worker

[Joanne98]

Pay is falling, benefits are vanishing, and no one's job is secure. How companies are making the era of the temp more than temporary

On a recent Tuesday morning, single mom Tammy DePew Smith woke up in her tidy Florida townhouse in time to shuttle her oldest daughter, a high school freshman, to the 6:11 a.m. bus. At 6:40 she was at the desk in her bedroom, starting her first shift of the day with LiveOps, a Santa Clara (Calif.) provider of call-center workers for everyone from Eastman Kodak (EK) and Pizza Hut (YUM) to infomercial behemoth Tristar Products. She's paid by the minute—25 cents—but only for the time she's actually on the phone with customers.

By 7:40, Smith had grossed $15. But there wasn't much time to reflect on her early morning productivity; the next child had to be roused from bed, fed, and put onto the school bus. Somehow she managed to squeeze three more shifts into her day, pausing only to homeschool her 7-year-old son, make dinner, and do the bedtime routine. "I tell my kids, unless somebody is bleeding or dying, don't mess with me."

As an independent agent, Smith has no health insurance, no retirement benefits, no sick days, no vacation, no severance, and no access to unemployment insurance. But in recession-ravaged Ormond Beach, she's considered lucky. She has had more or less steady work since she signed on with LiveOps in October 2006. "LiveOps was a lifesaver for me," she says.

You know American workers are in bad shape when a low-paying, no-benefits job is considered a sweet deal. Their situation isn't likely to improve soon; some economists predict it will be years, not months, before employees regain any semblance of bargaining power. That's because this recession's unusual ferocity has accelerated trends—including offshoring, automation, the decline of labor unions' influence, new management techniques, and regulatory changes—that already had been eroding workers' economic standing.

The forecast for the next five to 10 years: more of the same, with paltry pay gains, worsening working conditions, and little job security. Right on up to the C-suite, more jobs will be freelance and temporary, and even seemingly permanent positions will be at greater risk. "When I hear people talk about temp vs. permanent jobs, I laugh," says Barry Asin, chief analyst at the Los Altos (Calif.) labor-analysis firm Staffing Industry Analysts. "The idea that any job is permanent has been well proven not to be true." As Kelly Services (KELYA) CEO Carl Camden puts it: "We're all temps now."

Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, says the brutal recession has prompted more companies to create just-in-time labor forces that can be turned on and off like a spigot. "Employers are trying to get rid of all fixed costs," Cappelli says. "First they did it with employment benefits. Now they're doing it with the jobs themselves. Everything is variable." That means companies hold all the power, and "all the risks are pushed on to employees."

The era of the disposable worker has big implications both for employees and employers. For workers, research shows that chronic unemployment and underemployment cause lasting damage: Older people who lose jobs are often forced into premature retirement, while the careers of younger people are stunted by their early detachment from the working world. Even 15 years out of school, people who graduated from college in a recession earn 2.5% less than if they had graduated in more prosperous times, research has shown.

Diminishing job security is also widening the gap between the highest- and lowest-paid workers. At the top, people with sought-after skills can earn more by jumping from assignment to assignment than they can by sticking with one company. But for the least educated, who have no special skills to sell, the new deal for labor offers nothing but downside.

Employers prize flexibility, of course. But if they aren't careful they can wind up with an alienated, dispirited workforce. A Conference Board survey released on Jan. 5 found that only 45% of workers surveyed were satisfied with their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling. Poor morale can devastate performance. After making deep staff cuts following the subprime implosion, UBS (UBS), Credit Suisse (CS), and American Express (AXP) hired Harvard psychology lecturer Shawn Achor to train their remaining employees in positive thinking. Says Achor: "All the employees had just stopped working."

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http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_03/b4163032935448.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories

[Craftsman]

1. Thanks to free trade this is the future for most of us

And neither party will disobey their corporate masters to end it.

[Gman2]

7. That is what is referred to as the washington consensus.

Us workers being progressively screwed, is already set in stone. Gevernment is NOT MEANT to address any shortcoming, or plan for any betterment. Free markets will create it, or it shouldnt be created.

[fasttense]

2. The article gloats over how well Spain is doing

with most of their labor force working as temps. Yet, Spain is expected to reach a 22% unemployment rate this year.

Of course at the end of the article the writer has to blame those darn federal regulations that get in the way of corporation profits and bonuses.

[Joanne98]

3. I know it's Bidness Week.

[Berry Cool]

4. Wow, Tammy really needs to switch to working for Alpine Access.

They pay by the hour, even when you have no calls. They also offer bennies within 30 days after hire. If she wants to do call center work at home, she's nuts to work for a company that pays her by the call and offers no bennies.

[blue97keet]

5. Hi tech is nothing but temp if not offshored already

[Gman2]

6. Damn straight. If it isnt nailed down, like your toilet, it's gone.

Anything but service, went. This was Reagan's plan. Clinton implimented Reagan's plan.

In the seventies, moldmakers had guys skulking around at lunch, offering you a dollar an hour more, across the alleyway. So, you took your tools, and moved over there. This is how Silicon valley tech was formed. After the 70's, all production was halted, or hobbled.

We were to make our bank, fleecing it out of foreigners, that buy our pristine economic system. And our military made it problematic, for any nation to opt out. Witness Chavez.

We call those that might opt out, communists, and we bomb and/or invade them. To open up their markets. That is why Viet Nam. They could be a terrible example for others. So, they had to suffer deprivation, so we could claim what they thunk is junk. No matter the cost. That is why it was a political war. With artificial boundaries, that didnt make sense. Unless all you wanted was a pitiful example of trying to go it alone.

Same with Cuba. Blocade their asses, soes you can lambast their innability to care for citizens.

We as a nation, have traded our birthright, for a mess of porridge. And Reagan is the man responsible. I for one will be glad when we put a torch, to all Reagan's idiotic conventional wisdoms. Those, are the things that have held back progress, for thirty years.

[Vidar]

8. K&R.

[salguine]

9. Well, until mobs of citizens, hundreds of thousands strong, decide to

storm the Capitol and Wall Street with torches and pitchforks, burning the buildings to the ground before dragging legislators and CEOs into the street to be guillotined, this is what we're gonna have. I haven't seen anything to persuade me that anything less will solve this problem in any kind of remotely permanent way.

[midnight]

10. K&R.