Temp (The Real Story of What Happened to Your Salary, Benefits, and Job Security)

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.

Every working person in America today asks the same question: how secure is my job? In postwar America, business and government leaders embraced a vision of a workforce rooted in stability, and the "bottom line" was about minimizing risk, not maximizing profit or shareholder value. Over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the postwar institutions that insulated us from volatility--big unions, big corporations, powerful regulators--have been swept aside by a fervent belief in the market. In Temp, Louis Hyman explains the real origins of the gig economy: it was created not by accident, but by choice. A series of deliberate decisions by consultants and CEOs made as early as the 1950s -- long before the digital revolution -- upended the longstanding understanding of what a corporation, factory, or shop was meant to do.

Temp tells the story of the unmaking of American work through the experiences of those on the inside: consultants and executives, and the temporary (and often invisible) data processors, line workers and migrant laborers. Drawing on the archives from companies such as Apple, HP, McKinsey & Company, and Manpower, Hyman shows how these firms helped corporations trade long-term stability for short-term profits. Temp also offers concrete ideas to restoring balance between prosperity and stability. Uber is not the cause of insecurity and inequality in our country, and neither is the rest of the gig economy. The answer 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.