Temps: The Many Faces of the Changing Workforce (review)

Every day millions of American workers face the workday knowing that when they arrive at work, they will not receive health insurance, will work side by side with co-workers weeks at a time without knowing their names or their personal lives, and will not earn job security or permanent employment in the process. These are the temporary workers who, through their position in the labor market, have helped fuel a market economy aimed at generating greater profits for companies and aided in the steady erosion of quality, permanent employment. Meanwhile these same temporary workers, whose work is devalued and deskilled, work hard with the hopes of gaining access to greater employment training opportunities and entrance into full-time employment—the myths generated by the Temporary Help Agency industry.

In Temps: The Many Faces of the Changing Workforce, Rogers provides an overview of temporary work among clerical workers and lawyers, introduces the notion of deskilling and devaluing of temporary work, explores the mechanisms of control used by temporary help agencies, and attempts to show that temporary workers "resist" temporary employer practices. Overall, the book presents interesting and thought provoking analysis concerning the types of control Temporary Help Agencies use to foster a docile, hardworking, and virtually powerless workforce. However it fails to provide a compelling case that temporary workers' form of individualistic "resistance" improves, in any way, the working conditions of temporary workers as a whole. Finally, because research for the book included only thirty-five interviews of temporary workers from 1993 and 1996 and from the author's own short months in the field of temporary work 1993-1994, it is uncertain whether generalizations can be made based on such a small sample size.

Rogers asserts that the process of deskilling and devaluing temporary clerical workers serves to increase employer power over wages and working conditions, thus reducing overall costs for the company. Another way employers maintain and control wage rates is through quantifying the skills assessment so that pay changes from assignment to assignment. Rogers writes, "In contrast to how the industry markets the skills of its workers, here skill is defined as belonging to the job rather than to the workers. When skill belongs to the job, agencies can justify paying a lower rate to an individual with an abundance of human capital." Therefore, the temporary worker has no bargaining power in negotiating over wages or working conditions.

Rogers argues effectively that temporary agencies employ three main mechanisms of control to encourage compliance from its temporary workers: structural control, interpersonal control and discursive control. The very nature of temporary work with its instability, physical and social isolation from the permanent workforce, and the power that temporary agency agents have on workflow guarantee that temporary workers will work hard and remain docile in order to gain more work in the future.

The author's argument that, despite physical and social isolation, workers are waging individual rather than collective "resistance" to employer tactics remains weak. Some examples of individualistic resistance aimed at employer tactics given are: stealing from the office, creating the image of working hard and simply looking busy, performing "own work," or sleeping on the job. While these examples may truly reflect interview responses about employee resistance, in no way do these examples shed light on the possibilities for real collective resistance that may lead to greater worker control over wages and working conditions.

In all, the arguments Rogers put forward are interesting ones. However, the discussion given on each topic holds little weight because of less than adequate research, the small sample size, and no historical perspective on the industry.

Finally, while the discussion regarding control tactics used by Temporary Help Agencies may help trade unionists better understand current trends toward employer use of more "indirect" rather than overt forms of worker control, overall Temps: The Many Faces of...