On Jul 22, 2009, at 7:45 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:
> But in the short term, i.e., this Great Recession, there has been a
> couple of records set as far as "people working part-time for
> economic reasons," no? Which I think it what a lot of people
> intuitively mean by the causalization of work even if it's not
> technically temporary work.
Oh, absolutely - though that's not what people really mean by the casualization. They talk as if it's a long-term trend starting sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. But it's not.
Shag makes a really good point when she says that people who make the casualization argument never really appreciated how volatile much blue- collar work really was. Even way back in the golden age, 1970, employment in auto - the prototypical "Fordist" job - was only about 1% of the total. As recently as 2001 it was just a hair under 1%. It's now about half that - a mix of cyclical and structural changes in recent years. Retail in 1970 was 10% of the total - now it's 11%. But to hear the Stanley Aronowitz's of the world talk, you'd think that everyone worked for GM 30 or 40 years ago and now everyone works for Wal-Mart.
Doug