Temp

March 15, 2018

Author of the award-winning and multi-best-booked memoir Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness, and Becoming a Man, McBee is the first transgender man to box in Madison Square Garden. Here he recounts training for that event while pondering the complicated relationship between masculinity and violence.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2018

Cornell professor Hyman shows that aggressive decisions made by top businessmen a half century ago in the name of the market killed the concept of business as a provider of goods and services, built around a shop, factory, or corporation. With profit the top motive, job security crashed and the gig economy came into being.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 14, 2018
This disquieting history of worker dispensability from Hyman (American Capitalism: A Reader), a Cornell economic history professor, tries to find cause for optimism in the emergence of the “gig economy,” but will still leave salaried employees looking nervously over their shoulders. He carefully traces the growth of the temporary labor movement, from the temp secretaries of the post-WWII firms Manpower Inc. and Kelly Girl to today’s freelancers hired through online services like Craigslist and Upwork. Hyman notes that, by the late 1960s, Manpower’s CEO, Elmer Winter, was already envisaging a wholly temporary workforce. However, it took the corporate trimming, restructuring, and downsizing of the 1980s to make “leanness” a business ideal, in which companies shed workers like unwanted pounds. 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. In the last chapter, Hyman lays out ambitious suggestions for how society can make “the flexible workforce and the flexible firm... work for us,” such as through increased incentives for small business ownership, yet leaves it very uncertain whether this brave new world will usher in greater worker freedom or even greater instability. Agent: Eric Lupfer, Fletcher & Co.

June 1, 2018
A revealing study of the "gig economy," which, though it seems new, has long antecedents.Speaking in the middle of a major recession, an entrepreneur named Elmer Winter told an audience of business executives that the complacent world of lifetime employment and job security would soon come to a screeching halt, the victim of rising labor costs and the need to compete globally. Winter's speech, Hyman (Economic History/Cornell Univ.; Borrow: The American Way of Debt, 2012, etc.) slyly notes, came not in 2018 but in 1958, at the beginning of an era in which corporations began to transform into cash conduits meant to funnel quarterly dividends into the hands of shareholders rather than building carefully with an eye to the long term. In that scenario, the old values of workforce stability and risk minimization gave way to a different way of doing business, one in which layers of temporary workers were as important in commerce as adjunct faculty would become in academia. A principal driver in the transformation was the electronics business, which, as it morphed into the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, needed to be able to hire on the spot, let people go when demand slacked, and otherwise be nimble enough to change product lines quickly. Hyman, who writes engagingly, observes that this is not necessarily good nor bad; it's just as it is. However, he does foresee trends that may improve conditions for consultants, freelancers, and temporary workers: Disintermediating technology will allow workers to position themselves in the marketplace. "Right now we are too fixated on upskilling coal miners into data miners," writes the author. "We should instead be showing people how to get work via platforms like Upwork and Etsy with their existing skills." Provided, one assumes, that Etsy is recruiting coal miners....A quietly hopeful spin on an economic process that has proved tremendously dislocating for a generation and more of workers.

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June 1, 2018
How did modern American work become an uneasy combination of side hustles? The answer, writes Hyman (Debtor Nation, 2011), goes deeper than Uber, further back than downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our economy and our businesses work. Scarred by the Great Depression and transformed by WWII, the postwar American workforce saw several new developments: stronger benefits like health insurance and pensions, temp agencies like Manpower that offered cheap labor, a growing dependency on migrants for agricultural work, and the emergence of a new and permanent consultancy class, whose ethos of restructuring and leanness would spread throughout corporate America, starting in the 1960s. 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. Despite some overly thorough stretches, the book succeeds as a synthesis of economics, sociology, and history by opting for good storytelling over jargon. Recommended as a topical title for all collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)