The Poverty of Work: Selling Servant, Slave, and Temporary Labor on the Free Market by David Van Arsdale, and: Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman, and: A Day’s Work by David M. Garcia (review)

About four million temps daily report to work in the United States. Following the 2008 economic recession, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 90 percent of all new jobs created were temporary. The majority of temps labor in the economy’s industrial sector, working for corporate employment agencies that rent the temps’ labor to businesses for varying periods of time. They are vulnerable, expendable, and relatively inexpensive, allowing employers flexibility and increased control over their bottom line. Most temps are compensated only for their dispatched time, no matter how long they sit around employment offices waiting to be called to a job, and all temps fall outside the labor protections and federal oversight that workers won in the twentieth century. How did we get here, and what does it mean for workers today and in the near future that so many of our jobs are insecure?

The two studies and a documentary under discussion contribute to conversations that contextualize and humanize the recent transformations within capitalism that produced the relatively recent surge in temp employment. David Van Arsdale provides a participant-observer examination of temp labor. His personal experiences as a temp provide a contemporary twist on Barbara Ehrenreich’s observations on working in the service sector (Nickel and Dimed: On [Not] Getting By in America, 2001). Together, Van Arsdale and Ehrenreich’s works speak volumes on the current state of wage work. Van Arsdale also offers a historical context to today’s temp agencies that dates to English and French monarchs of the seventeenth century and the colonial system. To Van Arsdale, employment agencies then and now engage in a similar immoral practice of selling the labor of the most vulnerable in society.

Where Van Arsdale takes a centuries-long view, Louis Hyman keeps his focus on the last sixty years of the American corporation. Using individuals, companies, and labor organizations as case studies, Hyman traces the rise of flexibility and insecurity at the top, middle, and bottom of the business world. His study shows the interconnected yet drastically disparate ways flexibility and temp work shape modern business practices. The story of workers, their organizations, and how changes in corporate America have affected them are well known by readers of this journal, and Hyman covers familiar ground. His unique contribution is in uncovering the intellectual and cultural trajectory toward flexibility and temporary labor nurtured by key corporate executives and consultants. His controversial argument is that corporate consultants and particular business leaders, rather than technology or broader economic change, are responsible for upending post–World War II corporate values of longevity and security. The move to flexibility at work appeals to Hyman, who argues that “humans should not do the work of robots” (13). To him, the shift to a more insecure work environment is not necessarily bad. He argues that only “organized power” can “make capitalism work for us” (13).

Hyman’s optimistic tone contrasts sharply with David M. Garcia’s A Day’s Work, the poignant and powerful documentary film about the precarious and lethal nature of temp work. The documentary centers on the tragic death of twenty-one-year-old Lawrence “Day” Davis at a Bacardi plant in Jacksonville, Florida. Day’s first day as a temp worker was his last. About an hour and a half into his shift, a palletizer crushed him. The documentary introduces viewers to Day and shows the gaping hole his death left in his family. Interspersed in the telling of this family tragedy are voice...