Country of Exiles (10 page)

Since 1980 we have returned to these earlier times but with big differences, not the least of which has been the rise of a giant temporary-help business that has systematized what
in the late nineteenth century was a very messy activity.
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Temporary-help agencies (as well as outsourcing firms, which they resemble) are
not
employment agencies but profit-seeking firms that recruit, screen, and rent workers whose employment lasts only so long as the employers want it to last. These workers, moreover, always come cheap and get few of the benefits given full-time workers (health insurance, vacation pay, sick leave, pensions, etc.); together with contracted-out labor, part-timers, on-call workers, and the self-employed, they represent upwards of 30 percent of all American workers (the percentage is far higher in metropolitan New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and similar places).
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Before 1980, when Americans thought of “temps” at all, they may have imagined contractors who “sold” secretaries or day laborers, foreign and native-born. Such temporaries still exist, of course, and in more abundance than ever, the result especially of congressional desire to meet the omnivorous labor demands of America’s corporate farmers.
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But three new things have happened. First, the business ballooned, with the numbers of temp firms soaring to unheard-of levels (from
800
in 1956, to
16,000
in 1993).
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By the late nineties, moreover, the temporary-help industry had radically consolidated, reflecting the merger mania rippling throughout the economy, and producing “one-stop shopping” able to satisfy any temporary-staffing necessity, according to the
Wall Street Journal.
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The second thing that happened was that the temp business sold skilled middle-class labor as well as cheap unskilled labor. It reached out, in other words, to cover such skilled professionals as lawyers, chemists, engineers, biologists, and accountants, to mention a few—the sort of workers Americans had rarely viewed as temporary.
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Corporations of all kinds have depended on temporary skilled professionals as a way of controlling costs
and competing worldwide with other firms; so much has this been the case that in 1997 the United States was the biggest market for such temporary employment in the world, accounting for about 40 percent of the temp market.
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This increase in the supply of professionals, moreover, included the recruitment of temporary skilled foreign workers, a practice ushered in after 1990 when Congress created a new visa category (H-1B). This law gave companies the right to employ skilled people cheaply from anywhere in the world on a temporary basis, so long as these institutions could prove that no Americans existed to perform these jobs.
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Notably pro-business, the law allowed firms to lay off Americans and replace them with foreign workers who almost always got permanent visas after employment. It demanded no written proof that firms had first looked for Americans, and it created no sure way of protecting the foreign workers from low wages and other abuses, since by law the government had to wait for aggrieved workers to file complaints (and H-IB foreign workers almost never did, out of fear of losing their jobs).
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The new immigration law also spawned a near-vicious market in temporary foreign workers. By 1995 firms such as Syntel, Inc., in Troy, New York; Analytical Technologies, Inc., in Minneapolis; and Mastech, in Pittsburgh, had emerged to feed the appetite for such skilled labor. Founded ten years earlier by two Indian immigrants, Mastech proved the most predatory of companies in its quest for H-1B talent, selling its corporate customers H-1Bs in bulk. Its vulture recruiters “surfed the Internet, looking … for signs of distress [abroad], perhaps a currency collapse, or hostage event—something that [might] spur a software developer to forsake home for the suitcase-lugging life as a programmer for hire.”
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A third thing happened to this industry: it generated
chains
that dealt with unskilled and skilled labor alike. For historical
reasons that have not been studied well, Americans have shown remarkable aptitude for selling almost anything in volume through chains. In 1989, Glen Welstad, a forty-five-year-old businessman in Kent, Washington, founded Labor Ready, a temporary-labor chain selling manual work on a daily basis. Welstad, a graduate of the University of North Dakota, already had “chain store” experience: for years he was a franchisee of Hardee’s Hamburger Restaurants and officer of Body Toning, Inc., and other chains. He was so good at his business, in fact, that he retired at forty. But Welstad was soon restless and returned fired up to start another kind of chain. He dreamed of creating the “McDonald’s of temporary staffing for the manual labor market,” with identical “stores” everywhere in America.
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Labor Ready hired unskilled workers, often immigrants who sold their labor on street corners (to the chagrin of many locals) to haul, lift, paint, and dig. Among the firm’s leading clients were the movers of the country’s new goods, the trucking companies, the warehouses, the big chains such as Home Depot and Bed Bath and Beyond. For wages paid by Labor Ready to the workers, the company got a fee from clients using the labor, covering wages plus profit; the workers, however, received none of the usual benefits paid to permanent employees. Labor Ready’s trademarks were its “dispatch halls” or “stores,” where workers gathered at 6
A.M
. to be matched with their jobs (by managers who arrived at 5:30); its automated cash dispensers (because, as Welstad said, the workers preferred the “privacy” of cash); and its transport system (the company itself transported the workers to and from their sites). Labor Ready also boasted a software system, LabPro, that monitored, on an almost hourly basis, the success or failure of the various “stores.” Such surveillance, like the one used by trucking firms to track truckers, pressured managers, who sold on commission, to sell labor fast and efficiently.
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The pressures paid off. In the early nineties, Labor Ready had only eight offices; by 1998, it was a publicly traded darling of Wall Street with more than 400 offices and revenues approaching half a billion dollars.
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The systematic chain-selling of temp labor, however, touched skilled workers as well. Tom Buelter, for instance, of Calabasas, California, founded a firm, On Assignment, Inc., in the early nineties to sell chemists and biologists. Buelter’s strategy was to locate recent college graduates and customize them to employers short-term. By 1994 he owned forty-four branch offices and had placed thousands of “workers” into industrial labs around the country.
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Global high-tech computer firms and universities exemplified best, perhaps, how far the temporary had penetrated into this skilled market. Consisting of a core group of managers plus a large community of “flexed” and “just-in-time” employees hired to carry out on-time projects, high-tech firms have long been wedded to temp agencies as “virtual human resources department[s]” for the “screening, testing, and training” of highly skilled labor.
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They also raked the world for
young
skilled foreign labor, oblivious of where their employees came from, and exploiting to the hilt the government’s 1990 immigration policy. Between 1992 and 1994 alone software companies like Intel, Netscape, 3M, and Microsoft scooped up nearly 110,000 H-1B workers.
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Voracious and pesty, high-tech companies lobbied again and again for an increase in the quota of such workers, on the grounds that the domestic supply could not meet the demand.
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But since America’s population was the third largest in the
world, nearing 260 million by the mid-nineties (in 1999 closer to 275 million), and these firms cared little or nothing about national borders, the truth lay elsewhere than in the lack of domestic supply. “We want great flexibility,” said a 3M executive, William McClellan, in 1995. “We want the ability to bring our people in from Brussels or people in from Taiwan, to do the work we need to do.” “Because of globalization,” argued Motorola’s CEO, Richard Eagle, “we have to move people back and forth very quickly.” Immigration lawyer Paul Parsons, who worked for computer companies in Austin in the nineties, summed it up: “Companies are frustrated. They want to hire the best and the brightest. And they want to be able to move their key people in quickly, often temporarily.”
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From the managerial perspective, these best and brightest were the stars of a fluid firmament, exemplary workers in the way illegal immigrants (cheap, deferential, silent in the face of abuses, tolerant of high levels of mobility), models for American employees who might be “less willing to relocate” or more demanding of respect.
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Global high-tech firms, along with other global companies such as Proctor and Gamble and Ford Motor Company, have worked hard to change the basic logic of the country’s immigration policy, which historically offered a haven to the oppressed of the world while, at the same time, protecting American labor from unfair competition by foreigners. These approaches were dated, global firms have argued, especially the approach favoring the protection of American workers.
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Intel, Digital Equipment, Eastman Kodak, and others have insisted that such protection merely “subsidized labor” in a way similar to that of the protective tariffs that favored American goods over foreign. It belonged to the Old Time before the “globalization of the marketplace.” What was needed now
was not a policy to protect American workers, to say nothing of creating a refuge for the oppressed of the world, but rather one to subsidize American businesses, to “reflect the realities of the contemporary global marketplace,” and to remove all the “stifling” obstacles to the “international movement of personnel.”
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For years, high-tech firms, indifferent to the nation and its borders, have urged Congress to ignore the interests of domestic workers. They have, in other words, encouraged Congress to act as a willing agent in the destruction of national identity on behalf of creating richer transnational companies with little commitment to the country. In 1998 they succeeded in getting both the Clinton administration and the Congress—especially the market-oriented Republican majority, who disregarded the House’s own report that “the shortage” of American workers had been grossly exaggerated and that companies like 3M, Motorola, and Xerox were even planning to fire thousands of workers—to raise the number of H-1B visas from 65,000 to 95,000 and to 115,000 annually for the years 1999 through 2002.
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Like other businesses headed by shrewd managers, universities, too, have turned to temporary and part-time instructors to teach students and run laboratories. Over the past fifteen years, at least, they have erected a two-tiered system that has closely followed the one that has arisen in business. The upper tier consists of a core of tenured faculty who get full health benefits and job security, plus such perquisites as paid sabbaticals and generous vacation time.
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The lower tier of this system, in the early seventies around 20 percent of faculty but by 1998 43 percent, contains a swelling corps of people variously called “gypsies,” “invisible faculty,” or “the migrant workers of the academy.”
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Many are drawn from
seemingly unchanging numbers of native-born graduate students, while others are postdoctoral candidates, native-born and foreign, whose numbers doubled from 17,000 in 1975 to 35,500 in 1995 and who worked like faculty but got low pay and no job security.
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Close to 70 percent of all instructors at community colleges in 1997 were adjuncts or temporaries.
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The very existence of the upper tier depends on a beleaguered lower faculty. “Part-time faculty,” said a department chair in a major urban university, “are the protection for the university. The tenured faculty can’t be removed. The budget is fluctuating up and down. Therefore, the part-time faculty are the buffer. They take care of the budget surges and shortages.” Another has said that “we buy cheap labor and we get what we pay for.”
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Years ago, many Americans longed to join the academy, not only because of the intellectual adventure there but because it seemed to offer a world where spouses and children, as well as single people, misfits, and eccentrics, might get some sense of security and continuity, even after retirement. As Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, observed in 1962, “the university, as an institution” aims to give four things to faculty: “stability,” “security,” “continuity,” and a “sense of equity (they should not be suspicious that others are being treated better than they are).”
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By 1970 this culture, this world, had begun to disintegrate. What emerged in its place was a disorderly environment sometimes riven by feuds and fears, where tenure had ceased being a way to protect academic independence and had become instead a fortress in a storm and the property of an ever-shrinking few. Was a sense of place, to say nothing of loyalty to place, likely in this context, especially for the new brigade of temporaries?

For many businesses at the frontlines of the global economy, then, the last decade and a half have been banner years, marked by a steady flow of abundant casual labor, skilled and unskilled, in nearly every sector of the American economy. Such conditions of labor and management have made American businesses the most competitive and predatory anywhere. But many problems have accompanied this development.

One serious problem connected with this new economic universe has been the birth of huge urban agglomerations whose very character has been determined by the growth of contingent labor pools and whose identity as places is the very placelessness that afflicts them. Metropolitan New York and Los Angeles are among such places; the culture and economy of both are shaped by the decline of an older manufacturing base and by the ubiquitous presence of a casualized workforce, including temporaries, part-timers, subcontractors, and so forth. The informal work economy, which operates generally underground or beyond convention and law, and involves mostly recent immigrant labor (illegal and legal, children and adults), has brought together masses of people from every point in the world, people whose only bond is their contingency. Many of these people, in turn, exist to serve the interests of “urban glamour zones” occupied by an elite (financial-service providers of all kinds, bankers, planners, advertising people, and so forth) which itself has become accustomed to temporariness and which has little attachment to America except as a launching pad for careerist dreams.
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