Abstract
In The Temp Economy, Erin Hatton offers an extended analysis of the temporary industry’s role in changing employment relations since World War II. Hatton contends that the staffing industry is more than a fortunate recipient of social change in the postwar era. Instead, temporary help organizations and their executives have been actively shaping policy, practices, and even our cultural understanding of employment. The result is a shift from an asset model of employment to a modernized liability model, a model in which workers are cast as mere inputs into the profit-and-loss statement.
The liability model, now “common sense,” has been enormously beneficial for the industry. However, the model did not take on common sense status accidentally but rather through an extended ideological campaign including books, trade publications, commercials, print ads, employment brochures, and Congressional testimony. Industry executives cast themselves as experts in a new disease called “overstaffing,” which could be ameliorated through hiring a temporary workforce. Industry representatives worked diligently for decades to influence public policy and employment law with a remarkable record of success, although not without some meaningful resistance.
Hatton holds that these efforts passed under the radar and became institutionalized in the labor market largely because the industry initially cast temporary work as women’s work, “‘respectable’ (white, middle-class) but marginal work” (p. 22). Enter, the Kelly Girl. Industry executives sold temporary work as a means for women to ameliorate “housewifeitis” and attain self-fulfillment without the accompanying household conflicts. Hatton’s is not the first analysis of the gendered story of temporary employment; however, this work is novel in both the depth and breadth of the data. After reviewing tens of thousands of pages of advertisements, business publications, government testimony, newspaper, and magazine articles, Hatton paints a detailed, lively, and convincing account of the ways the temporary industry deployed gender ideology in the service of early industry expansion. The presentation of the data here is both seamless and skillful. There is also nuance in her argument, for the deployment of gender ideology is not unproblematic but encounters the cultural tensions of the time. We see agencies simultaneously casting women’s temporary work as “not work” while at the same time advertising “skilled,” trained, and proficient workers. Hatton rightly notes the relative absence of men in advertisements during this expansion as well as the strategic importance of such absence, aiding the industry’s incursion in more male-dominated sectors.
The staffing industry was not, however, the sole force behind the institutionalization of temporary services. Industry executives tapped into a variety of important emerging debates regarding deindustrialization and rising global competition and assumed the role of “experts” on human resource management. During this time, the target of industry advertising became the beleaguered executive who would defer to the somewhat unconventional but superior knowledge of staffing industry executives who recommended a “lean and mean” employment model. The data here are also rich, drawing mainly on advertisements, congressional hearings, and trade publications. The Kelly Girl image took a back seat as the industry pressed its expansion into professional and managerial ranks and promoted long-term use, that is, “permatemps,” sometimes replacing an entire workforce with temporary employees. To temper any backlash, the industry began promoting the “ring-and-core” model, meant to shelter some workers while maintaining reliance on temporary employees. Hatton notes the irony of the staffing industry’s support of the asset model even as their practices undermined it. So successful were these campaigns that the civil service sector adopted industry language to make the business case for the routine use of private sector temporary agencies. By the 1990s, the liability model and the staffing industry were firmly rooted in the U.S. labor market.
Chapter 4 focuses on several challenges to staffing industry hegemony that arose despite its impressive size and political clout at the end of the 20th century. Multiple lawsuits tested the industry’s definition of employment as merely an economic transaction and instead promoted the inclusion of other factors (location, supervision) when determining employer status. In the end, Hatton is optimistic that the outcome of these struggles has in some way reduced the cultural hold of the liability model of work. The waters have indeed become murky with government agencies such as OSHA and the EEOC tending toward recognizing coemployment, perhaps reducing the business incentives for outsourcing. A less sanguine conclusion may be fitting. Hatton notes the remarkable contemporary educational campaigns for employers funded by the staffing industry to maintain the status quo in the face of legislative challenge. Temporary workers may gain some relief from the worst abuses of the staffing industry; however, it remains to be seen to what extent employers will return to an asset model of employment. I appreciate this book not only for the content but also for the fine example of how to write qualitative analysis.