Every time I use a ride-sharing app on my phone, choose an automated checkout machine over a human cashier, or accept a short-term work contract, I am participating in the world made possible by the management consultants and temp agencies who populate Louis Hyman's Temp. In Temp, Hyman, associate professor at Cornell and director of the Institute for Workplace Studies, offers a narrative about the decline of secure jobs and the rise of the gig economy against the backdrop of changing business practices and managerial values.
Written in accessible and lively prose and published by trade press Viking, Temp is intended for a wide, nonscholarly audience. Temp will appeal to historians of business, technology, and labor as well as sociologists, management scholars, and communication scholars interested in the gig economy. Business and labor historians may find much of the story familiar; they may dispute some of the historical claims; and yet they will find much to admire in this engaging account of temporary work and the gig economy.
Temp traces a shift from the big postwar firm, which valued stability in work and in business structure, to the post-1970 “lean” corporation, which valued maximizing profits and temporary labor. The 1950s defined a new world of postwar stability, marked by real GDP growth, improvements in wages and standards of living, and technological progress—and, importantly, an attitude that prosperity would continue and that a secure, good job was an American right. For Hyman, 1970 was a watershed mark that, owing to a combination of financialization and changing corporate strategies, led to the steady replacement of permanent workers with temporary workers. Across the corporate ladder, Hyman argues, “work would become more insecure as it became more flexible” (p. 2). For Hyman, the transformation from stability to precarity is not the product of “economic accident” or “technological inevitability” but the result of deliberate actions by the management consultants and temp agencies profiled in the book (p. 2).
Two firms form the backbone to this story of temporary work: management consulting firm McKinsey and temp agency Manpower. Temp is valuable in shifting focus away from the firm, a long-standing analytic focus of business historians, to instead center the temp agencies and consulting firms that have received comparatively less attention. This narrative focus also allows the author to integrate histories of management with histories of labor. Hyman, himself a former McKinsey consultant, argues that the key figures who sold the vision of lean organizations were “capitalist intellectuals—consultants and gurus” (p. 185). The rise of strategy consulting encouraged corporations to analyze business units as assets and to outsource to the market what companies could not control—which included labor. Moreover, as consultants went in to remake other organizations, the internal work practices of consulting firms, including brutally long hours and shifting project-based teams, became the model for many types of work.
By the 1980s, leanness was firmly entrenched in the American economy, as exemplified by the case of Silicon Valley. Yet, rather than the high-tech, automated world we might imagine, Hyman centers on the underpaid, dangerous piecework of migrant women working for electronics manufacturers. Because of the speed at which transistor capacity increased, companies did not find it profitable to automate this labor and instead subcontracted work to smaller shops, sometimes kitchens, harkening back to preindustrial at-home piecework. At Apple's Macintosh factory, for example, assembly work was done by women of color, largely Spanish-speaking, sometimes undocumented migrant workers—a deliberate strategy to hire workers unlikely to unionize and to rely on the specter of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) surveillance as looming workplace discipline.
There is certainly value in comparing the elite consultants at McKinsey to the temporary migrant worker. Yet the instability of management consultants, who left McKinsey for high-profile corporate positions while remaining valued alumni, is clearly different from the instability of migrant workers exposed to toxic chemicals and subject to INS deportation. It is not that Temp ignores these inequalities; the question is whether the category of temp work can adequately cover these varied, unequal instances of labor.
American historians might disagree with the narrative arc of Temp, particularly the claim that everything had changed by 1970 as businesses shifted from prioritizing stability to prioritizing leanness. In another light, the postwar moment taken to mark the apex of stability appears as a fleeting moment rather than the bedrock of a lasting American economy. Hyman does highlight, crucially, that the postwar period should not be romanticized, as women, people of color, and migrant workers were largely excluded from the postwar promise of stability. Yet a counternarrative could be told in which the 1950s marked an era of widespread employment discrimination, altered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which resulted in increasing numbers of women and African Americans in the workplace by the 1970s.
Temp does not prove that everyone became temps. What it shows is the way the American economy came to rely on the dynamic between temporary and permanent labor. From the founding of Manpower in 1948, temp labor was sold as a strategy to shore up the permanent workforce, allowing workers to take vacation and sick days. By the mid-1980s, temp labor was a permanent budget line for many companies; temp labor had become permanent, even as the workers had not.
The digital gig economy exemplified by companies like Uber and Upwork is not a disruptive new kind of work dependent on new technology, Hyman argues, but rather the logical outgrowth and acceleration of the business model of temp agencies like Manpower and practices in Silicon Valley. Similarly, what was revolutionary about the Industrial Revolution, he notes, was not the technological changes but the reorganization of people entailed by new models of factory labor. For historians of business and technology existing in the long shadow of arguments about managerial capitalism, Hyman's argument against technological determinism is not a new point.
As Hyman argues, the automation of work is neither inevitable nor inherently bad. Evoking a strand of utopian labor thought about the liberating potential of technology, Temp ends on an optimistic and pragmatic note. Rather than worry about the outsourcing of jobs to machines, Hyman suggests, recognize that humans should not be performing dehumanizing work that can be better done by robots. To be sure, few would agree with all of Hyman's suggestions, yet many might admire the attempt to use the history traced in Temp to advocate for better present and future realities of work. With this book, Hyman is aiming to intervene in broader debates over the future of work and to show how questions about the automation and outsourcing of labor are not technical questions but political and ethical choices about the kind of society Americans want to inhabit.
