#gig-economy
What Happened to All the Good Jobs?
[su_quote cite=”The Nation”]94 percent of jobs created in the last 10 years were “nontraditional” employment, and one-third of Americans now do some form of contract work. More often than not, it is far from a liberating option: In many cases, the pay is measly—after operating costs, Uber drivers in Detroit would have made more working at Walmart—and stringing together hours can itself be a struggle.
Louis Hyman’s new book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, shows that this shift in work did not happen on its own, and that it began long before the founding of Uber or TaskRabbit. In this persuasive and richly detailed history, Hyman traces a decades-long campaign to eliminate salaried positions and replace them with contract work. Between the emergence of the first temp agencies in the 1940s and the growing power of management consultants in the ’70s, American business adopted a new set of principles and began to squeeze not just blue-collar workers but also middle managers and top executives. The unmaking of the good job, Hyman argues, followed not from technological advances but from an organizational breakthrough, as executives at companies like Manpower Inc. and McKinsey & Co. convinced businesses to add and shed staff at a moment’s notice, with little regard for their employees’ well-being or the effects on society.[/su_quote]
https://www.thenation.com/article/what-happened-to-the-steady-job/
#contract-work #gig-economy #jobs #uber #work
Originally posted at: https://technosocial.com/2018/10/what-happened-to-all-the-good-jobs/