Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary

Pay with

About Temp: How American Work, American Business, And The

Product Description Winner of the William G. Bowen Prize  Named a "Triumph" of 2018 by New York Times Book Critics Shortlisted for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award The untold history of the surprising origins of the "gig economy" --how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of millions of working men and women in postwar America. Every working person in the United States asks the same question, how secure is my job? For a generation, roughly from 1945 to 1970, business and government leaders embraced a vision of an American workforce rooted in stability. But over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the postwar institutions that insulated us from volatility--big unions, big corporations, powerful regulators--have been swept aside by a fervent belief in "the market." Temp tracks the surprising transformation of an  ethos which favored long-term investment in work (and workers) to one promoting short-term returns. A series of deliberate decisions preceded the digital revolution and upended the longstanding understanding of what a corporation, or a factory, or a shop, was meant to do. Temp tells the story of the unmaking of American work through the experiences of those on the inside: consultants and executives, temps and office workers, line workers and migrant laborers.  It begins in the sixties, with economists, consultants, business and policy leaders who began to shift the corporation from a provider of goods and services to one whose sole purpose was to maximize profit--an ideology that brought with it the risk-taking entrepreneur and the shareholder revolution and changed the very definition of a corporation. With Temp, Hyman explains one of the nation's most immediate crises. Uber are not the cause of insecurity and inequality in our country, and neither is the rest of the gig economy. The answer goes deeper than apps, further back than downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our businesses should work. Review "Illuminating and often surprising...a book that encourages us to imagine a future that is inclusive and humane rather than sentimentalize a past that never truly was." —The New York Times   “In this persuasive and richly detailed history, Hyman traces a decades-long campaign to eliminate salaried positions and replace them with contract work.” —The Nation “A fascinating journey through changing nature of work." —Forbes “Hyman looks at the reasons behind the temporary nature of so much of the American economy…[He] examines the changes in American corporate life after the 1950s and 1960s, and why the much-mythologized postwar years were less rosy than we think.“ —Slate " Temp dispels the myth that business ever took a break from undermining what meager protections workers had eked out." —Jacobin “Temp covers a century of economic history in which a dismal dynamic emerges…Hyman’s history is incisive when it comes to Silicon Valley’s questionable labor practices.” —Los Angeles Review of Books "Hyman’s examination of the evolution of work is thorough, thoughtful, and sympathetic, importantly not excluding the people—immigrants, minorities, women, and youth—largely ignored in the “American Dream” model for employment once all but guaranteed to white men." —Publishers Weekly "A revealing study of the "gig economy," which, though it seems new, has long antecedents...[and] a quietly hopeful spin on an economic process that has proved tremendously dislocating for a generation and more of workers." —Kirkus Reviews"Hyman charts the decades-long rise of our automation-fueled “ad-hocracy” through the companies that helped create it, from the early days of GM to Upwork and Uber today...The book succeeds as a synthesis of economics, sociology, and history by opting for good storytelling over jargon." —Booklist“How employers learned to prefer disposable workers without rights for