Imagine a world in which our labor is completely fluid and mobile. We move from job to job, working for one employer and then another, or perhaps simultaneously for multiple employers. In this world we are, most of us, permanently temporary employees, or “perma-temps,” in the term used recently by Business Week.
According to BW, we now live in the “era of the disposable worker.” This is not a brand new development; the trend towards permanently temporary workers has been underway for decades. What is new is that it encompasses virtually all kinds of worker; it is no longer limited to low-wage part timers. The ferocity of the current recession has made even the most secure and privileged among us aware that we’re disposable.
Take Matthew Bradford, laid off last year by his law firm. “I never would have thought this would have happened. I thought, ‘Hey, I’ve got a law degree and an MBA. I’m not going to be out of work.’ It’s just not the case anymore.”
So it comes down to this for increasing numbers of us: in order to make a living–that is, to live–we sell our capacity for labor to one or more employers, who stop buying it when they don’t need or can’t afford it anymore. At that point this capacity, like any other commodity, rots or depreciates until it finds another buyer.
The most acute observers of this trend may be those who make their money from it. The CEO of Kelly Services, a leading temp agency, says simply: “We’re all temps now.” Maynard Webb, the CEO of LiveOps, another large temp agency, is a former executive of eBay. “We want to do for the world of work what eBay did for commerce,” he says. “You have access to the talent you need. And when the need is gone, the talent goes away.”
It would be a mistake to describe Mr. Webb’s statement as callous. It is our economic system that’s callous; Mr. Webb is merely telling it like it is, and we appreciate his clarifying the true nature of our labor in this system. The recession and people like Mr. Webb have done more to reveal the increasingly disposable quality of our work, and of ourselves, than a roomful of economists.
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