Working the risk shift.

• Author: McClure, Laura
• Position: Temporary employment growth and abuses - Cover Story

Lena is tired of being a temp. For a year now, she's been looking for a full-time job--no luck. Unemployment in New York City is high, and competition for jobs is intense. In the meantime, Lena has been paying the rent with temp jobs. And it hasn't been fun.

"I remember one day I registered at five different places," says Lena. "I felt like a migrant worker, just walking around the city, calling from phone booths. I went to the library to use the phone. Next to me I noticed another woman standing there with the want ads, and she was making phone calls, too. And then a security guard came over and tapped us both on the shoulder and told us to move on. It was one of the worst days of my life."

In the past year, Lena has worked for a bank, a pharmaceutical company, an advertising agency, and an insurance company. The insurance company was the worst.

"My desk was across from the elevator in a hallway," says Lena. "I was doing these idiot jobs, but it took some time to figure out which paper goes where, which form goes with what. It's insurance, so there are 5,000 forms, and I couldn't tell one from another. I was terrible at it. And my supervisor would yell at me. I was running to the bathroom and crying every day. And then people were talking to me like I was going to be there forever. And I thought: Just hand me the nails for the coffin! But I was afraid to leave, because I was afraid there would be no more work."

That's the tricky thing about the temp agencies, Lena says. You're afraid to say no for fear they won't call again. You're afraid to leave a job even if you are miserable. "It feels like unless you play it their way, you don't get the work," she says. (Lena asked that her real name not be used in this article so as not to jeopardize her employment. Most other interviewees had the same request.)

Lena makes a good wage--$16 an hour. But she has no benefits, no health coverage. Here's how she describes her dream: "I would like a full-time job with benefits and good pay."

It doesn't sound like Lena is asking for that much, but the fact is, regular, old-fashioned, full-time jobs with benefits are becoming precious. After all, the number-one private employer in the United States is not General Motors or Boeing; it's Manpower, Inc., a temporary agency.

Temps, together with part-time workers, contractors, consultants, and free-lancers, now constitute 25 to 30 per cent of the civilian work force, according to the National Planning Association. These workers are called "contingent" because of their tenuous, on-again, off-again relationship to employers. Insecurity is only one problem besetting contingent workers: Most go without health insurance, sick pay, and other benefits. And only a tiny percentage are unionized.

Contingent labor wasn't discovered in the 1990s, of course--part-time and temporary jobs have long been part of the economy. Temporary agencies got their start in the 1940s, and really became an economic force in the 1970s. But in the past decade, all types of contingent employment have surged. According to the National Association of Temporary Services, the annual payroll of the temporary work force jumped from $3.5 billion in 1981 to $14 billion in 1991.

In the course of our dismal economic "recovery" of the past two years, a significant percentage of the new jobs created were temporary or part-time. The Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found that 28 per cent were temp jobs, and 26 per cent were part-time. And many were taken by people who, like Lena, would rather be working full-time, permanently.

"This whole system--I hate it!" cries Dick Leonard, special projects director at the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union. Leonard's union has seen relatively low-paid, nonunion contractors replacing thousands of union members over the years. "It's the worst form of wage slavery you can imagine. Labor has become more of a commodity than ever," he says.

By turning to temporary or contract labor, companies often get away with rolling back benefit costs to zero, sidestepping union agreements, and skirting employment standards in general.

"I think it's all about deindustrialization," says Leonard. Only a minority of well-paying jobs are going to low-wage countries, he says, but that flow of jobs "is driving everything else down, it's setting a floor." Employers who don't want to risk moving businesses overseas "look for these other, really cruel ways to increase productivity."

Some have described the turn to contingent labor as a breaking of the postwar social compact between management and unions. But as any old CIO organizer will tell you, that compact was a product not only of the growing postwar economy, but also of hard-fought battles by unions and social movements to force better benefits and standards. The crumbling of the compact today has everything to do with the withering power of unions and the prevailing power of the multinationals.

But even a robust labor movement might not be able to stop the ebb of full-time, full-benefit jobs, which may be the victims of new technology and the integration of the global economy. Even in Europe, where workers generally have stronger unions and more political clout, the temporary work force is growing. (England and Germany, which have larger temp markets than the United States, require temps to work through licensed agencies that provide full benefits. In most of Europe, part-time employees must receive at least pro-rated sick pay and other benefits.)

Business puts its own happy spin on the contingent-worker phenomenon. Employers gush about...