Abstract
The Poverty of Work: Selling Servant, Slave and Temporary Labor on the Free Market combines ethnography with historical research to explore why “temporary work” is expanding exponentially, in the United States and globally. A participant observer in both corporate and informal employment agencies, David Van Arsdale provides photographic, experiential, and interview evidence of the social and economic insecurity of the flexibly employed. In addition to discussing temporary labor assignments in New York City and upstate New York, the author analyzes his archival findings on the origins of employment exchanges, the predecessors of contemporary global corporations in the staffing industry. Concluding that most newly created jobs in the post-Fordist era “make poverty” because they are “too temporary, too part-time, and too low-paying” (p.140), Van Arsdale proposes regulating the for-profit labor trade and organizing temporary workers. The author is a sociologist, and this is his first book.
The Poverty of Work is a fascinating and ambitious treatise, divided into three parts. The first part, consisting of two chapters, explores the contemporary terrain of temporary work. Chapter One introduces the reader to the global temporary staffing industry, a $440 billion business employing 61 million workers worldwide (p.6). Chapter Two examines temporary work from the employee’s point of view.
The largest number of “temps” are poorly educated (but not unskilled), performing manual and clerical labor. Van Arsdale worked alongside them at a vegetable packing plant, a pastry manufacturer, and a packaging factory. The vegetable factory is located in upstate New York, a region hit hard by plant closings and corporate downsizing. The author spent time before and after work with his coworkers, talking to them about their families, friends, homes, and previous work experiences. He heard their own friends criticize them at the bar they all frequented (pp. 38–40). Many laborers are middle-aged and often have been laid off from better jobs. While now employed by multinational corporations in the staffing industry, companies that have billions of dollars in annual revenue, their work assignments can be as short as a day, and their earnings are generally minimum wage. They wait for days, for which they are not paid, to be selected for work.
In New York City, the author ventured into storefronts, where jobs are offered for a finder’s fee, paid up front. He was taken in an unmarked van to a food factory, where many workers were undocumented, and all were paid by personal check from the agency—no Social Security number required. A coworker told him “workers are pimped by the agency and the factory” (p.52). Van Arsdale photographed production lines and a dreary agency waiting room, although coworkers discouraged him from asking questions or even empathizing when a linemate’s hands began to bleed. He learned that, to keep their jobs, agency workers decline to take sick days. Wages are less than minimum after transportation is deducted.
The emphasis in the chapter is on the hidden realities of low pay and job insecurity at mid-sized manufacturing plants and other small jobsites. No data were collected on the privilege of the educated contract worker at companies like Microsoft or the vulnerability of street-corner day laborers (see the 2004 documentary by Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini, “Farmingville”). The author does not mention sexual harassment, perhaps because he did not observe any or because most of his interviews were with male coworkers. For the corporate perspective on the staffing industry, Van Arsdale does not interview any employee higher up than an assignment dispatcher, relying instead on company annual reports, where CEOs sometimes offer their perspectives.
In the second third of the book, Van Arsdale discusses the origins and evolution of employment agencies, initially called “intelligence offices,” and their contribution to the development of modern capitalism. Over two chapters, he shows how employers and job seekers came together at English and American coffeehouses and taverns and at a government-sponsored Bureau d’Adresse in France beginning in the seventeenth century. Besides serving as clearinghouses for aristocrats looking for servants, these institutions allowed slave merchants to hire seamen and contributed to the trafficking of women into brothels.
Van Arsdale quotes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s views on slave trading and speculates that labor trading more generally might have been outlawed in the thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery, “had its full relationship to the history of employment agencies been better understood” (p.59). He also notes that while the organizations were publicly criticized, beginning in the eighteenth century, as abusive to laborers in Europe and the United States, they also served as the model for “benevolent” and “anti-slavery” employment agencies (pp. 77, 97–104). Like the photographs in the first part of the book, the author provides visual evidence, in the form of employment ads, paintings, and illustrations from period magazines.
In the last third of his book, Van Arsdale returns to today’s temporary worker, now emphasizing the impact of technological and social innovation on employment conditions and opportunities and their economic and social ramifications. In a vignette from his participant observation, he shows how human labor was replaced by the mechanical arm on garbage trucks, while the staffing industry now supplies temporary workers to drive and operate the trucks. He describes how laid-off factory workers, many of whom were homeowners, have lost their houses, retirement security, sometimes their families, and their standing in the community (pp.143–144, 152–157).
In a section entitled “Selling the Unemployed as Leverage for Capital Gains,” he argues that the staffing industry is profitable and is supported by American presidents and policymakers, including former Federal Reserve Chairperson Alan Greenspan (pp. 157–162). In these concluding two chapters, Van Arsdale also explores legislative and community solutions to “deprived employment.” He proposes the creation of nonprofit organizations and worker-owned and operated cooperatives as alternatives to the exploitation of workers by corporate and informal employment agencies or outlawed union hiring halls (p.181).
The Poverty of Work is readable by a general audience and should interest scholars of work and occupations, community development, and macroeconomic policy. It will be especially appealing to undergraduates and graduate students studying research methods. In addition to the hardcover version, the book is being offered as a print-on-demand paperback, where a library purchases an e-book and the publisher prints and ships copies to students for $25 apiece.
The book’s subtitle is confusing, as the book does not include data on contemporary servant or slave labor (the food factory comes close, but it is not a sweatshop where workers are locked in). While avoiding the jargon of precarity, globalization, and neoliberalism, the author could articulate his theoretical perspective more directly. Leading thinkers on flexible labor, such as Arne Kalleberg and Guy Standing, are cited just once each. Erin Hatton’s work is discussed in more detail, but primarily for her history of temporary work (The Temp Economy, 2011). David Harvey’s concept of “accumulation by dispossession” is mentioned only in the penultimate chapter (p.158). In two chapters the author discusses what he calls Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “theory on labor trade,” but throughout the book the analysis is neo-Marxist and institutionalist, only with limited references. Having written a book rich in empirical evidence and analysis, Van Arsdale should be forgiven for being less explicit about the development of his theoretical orientation.