Hi Ya Alec, good walk the other day with you! Alec Ramsdell Thursday Aug, 20, 98: "...With such a wide income-range doesn't the stat get evacuated of some of its usefullness? Perhaps the happy half are the upper half of the rather large income bracket(?)."
Doyle I think Doug's inquiry into temp work really goes way beyond just the anecdotal stories LBO have made so far. It is hard to know from the income range and other analytical tools the reality of this kind of work. I really like what Frances Bolton brought up about:
Frances Thursday Aug 20, 98: "A number of people posted on the difficulties of organizing temps. I believe it's probably difficult, but not impossible. 18 months or so ago, one of the nude clubs in San Francisco became a union shop (SEIU, I believe). I bring this up because, while nude clubs are not *formally* temp jobs, they de facto are...."
Doyle What I think ought to be teased out of this question about temping is the larger social element of marginalization. I will ask a question at the end of this post which is related to both my drift according to marginalization, and what Doug seems to want to hear from LBO.
Doug Henwood Thursday Aug. 20, 98: "This temp thread makes me think that it's politically wrong to name temp and part-time work as problems in themselves, rather than focusing on insecurity, low pay, and lack of benefits in general. And since there seem to be more than a few temporary and part-time workers who are not entirely unhappy with their work situation, denouncing their kind of employment as a general could alienate lots of people."
Doyle Doug seems to me to be saying that what's so wrong with temping as a way of defining work. The alternative being FTE. What I think gets mixed in here is the lack of power of workers to define their jobs themselves, thus one has to settle for temping, and the fact of the matter that FTE is no great bargain as far as we are concerned. That we ought to clear the decks of preconceptions, and really look at what we want. In order to do that I think we have to look how closely intertwined marginalization is with various employer tactics like temping. I notice how James Devine immediately brought up unskilled in regard to the kind of temp work I do. Well he is right I'm not skilled in the same sense Alec is. But why not? My answer is how I was marginalized, and the anecdotal history is irrelevent here, rather it is related to Frances bringing up organizing the nude club.
Doyle So I want to shift this inquiry slightly to the concept of decadence. I will put a social context upon the term, decadence. It seems to me that as the stock market goes into a bear market, the present era will close. The whole Reagan shebang will look like the past soon enough. So that period is decaying in my opinion right before our eyes, and I would call that decadence. But to the general population decadence is a bullet aimed at the marginalized. Primarily if my social sense is right, against homosexuality as a sign of "decadence". I reject the traditional forms of identifying decadence, which curiously Carrol Cox seemed to address recently in some kind of off hand remark about decadence too. We are in a period when a social order is decaying, but I want the whole idea of marginalization opened up so that us working class types get a better understanding of the directions which will free us from the goddamn oppression. And that is what I think Doug is getting at in an economist sort of way, when he tries to tease out what is so bad about temping. regards, Doyle