Temping

alec ramsdell a_ramsdell at hotmail.com
Mon Aug 24 10:31:12 PDT 1998


From: Rakesh Bhandari


>Marx's distinction between productive/unproductive labor does not map
out
>in terms the division between mfg and service employment.
>
>However, there seems to be a big wage gap between those who work in mfg
>and those in pure services--secretarial work, catering, janitors,
>landscaping, house cleaning, etc.
>
>How are we to explain this gap?
>
>According to James Galbraith, pure service employment seems to be the
>source of net job growth in the US (workers who deliver, assemble, and
>repair factory output could be considered mfg workers), and temping is
>concentrated in this sector as well. Now it would seem that only when
>capital has made a big investment in physical capital which it must
>amortize are employers willing to pay some wage premium and provide
some
>extra benefits in order to ensure that the amortization will not be
>interrupted by excessive turnover or irresponsible work. But then it
will
>pay capital to have such (relatively) well paid workers do overtime and
>thus conserve on benefits than hire new workers in a seasonal or even
more
>long term expansion (the use of overtime in the better paying mfg
sector
>seems a plausible candidate to explain increased wage inequality,e.g.,
the
>stories of $100,000 year autoworkers putting in 60 hour weeks--any
studies
>on this?) This use of overtime will have the effect of concentrating
new
>workers in the pure service industry in which no benefit temping is
>rampant and unions non-existent (as there is no expensive physical
>capital which would be idled by pure service workers' strikes, their
>power is seriously limited; ultimately I do think that only productive
>mfg labor has the latent social power with which to bring society to
its
>knees).
>
>Another question on the unemployment angle: so many of these pure
service
>jobs seem to be pseudo jobs. Real practical unemployment seems quite
high
>in the US. Some have argued that our unemployment indicators are biased
>downward (e.g., prisoners and uninsured drop outs, like me, are not
>included--my dept at UC Berkeley gives us 12 semesters of teaching
which I
>used up in rapid succession; there is a lot of grad student
unemployment).
>Doug has argued that while this is true, this has always been true, so
>there can be no question that there indeed has been an employment boom
of
>late. But then are these real jobs? And second, the kinds of
unemployment
>our indicators miss may indeed have been increasing of late (prisoners,
>underemployment of 'illegal aliens').

My secretarial temping assignments consistently fill one of two criteria: I am either there for someone out sick or on vacation; or I am there for some extra-administrative project, such as converting documents from one version of Bill Gates software or non-Bill Gates software to a new version of Bill Gates software. It is a psuedo employment, and the temps (service as opposed to mfg) have no leverage because as you note, no expensive capital would be idled by their absence. Upgrading or converting to a new version of Word isn't fundamentaly necessary, and the management I've worked for are usually equally disconcerted about this project. It's motivated mostly by issues of efficiency and industry communications compatibility. So the fragmentation of "full-time" work, outsourcing, continues. And many jobs that before might have been assigned to full-time administrative staff (such as document conversion, and these projects can be large and time-consuming, even 6 mos to 10 mos depending on the size of the firm), are taken up by temporary work. So this is an instance of management and the computer tech industry further splintering labor's leverage. Fewer full-time admins, more temps.

Also, in regards to underemployment of, in this instance "illegal aliens", I would wonder about a bias in (un)employment indicators. About 15 years ago in my hometown, not far from Tijuana, there was a noteable increase in the number of would-be immigrants seeking and finding employment at residences, gardening and other domestic work. I'm not sure if this represented an increase in numbers or a change in kind of employment sought. Are there any studies on the numbers, or the methodological complications of accounting for the numbers of such underemployed?

That is, there may not have been
>much of that unemployment our indicators are biased to disguise 25
years
>ago but now there is a lot of that kind of unemployment. So the
indicators
>are really only doing their most effective propanganda work now. The
>collapse of Keynesianism may have had more horrific impact that
commonly
>acknowledged. A possibility?
>
>best, rakesh
>
>
>

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