Temp: The Real Story of What Happened to Your Salary, Benefits, and Job Security

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About Temp: The Real Story Of What Happened To Your

Product Description Winner of the William G. Bowen Prize Named a "Triumph" of 2018 by New York Times Book CriticsShortlisted for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book AwardThe untold history of the surprising origins of the "gig economy"--how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of millions of working men and women in postwar America. Over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the institutions that insulated us from volatility have been swept aside by a fervent belief in the market. Now every working person in America today asks the same question: how secure is my job? In Temp, Louis Hyman explains how we got to this precarious position and traces the real origins of the gig economy: it was created not by accident, but by choice through a series of deliberate decisions by consultants and CEOs--long before the digital revolution. Uber is not the cause of insecurity and inequality in our country, and neither is the rest of the gig economy. The answer to our growing problems goes deeper than apps, further back than outsourcing and downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our businesses should work. As we make choices about the future, we need to understand our past. Review "Illuminating and often surprising...a book that encourages us to imagine a future that is inclusive and humane rather than sentimentalize a past that never truly was." —The New York Times   “In this persuasive and richly detailed history, Hyman traces a decades-long campaign to eliminate salaried positions and replace them with contract work.” —The Nation “A fascinating journey through changing nature of work." —Forbes “Hyman looks at the reasons behind the temporary nature of so much of the American economy…[He] examines the changes in American corporate life after the 1950s and 1960s, and why the much-mythologized postwar years were less rosy than we think.“ —Slate " Temp dispels the myth that business ever took a break from undermining what meager protections workers had eked out." —Jacobin “Temp covers a century of economic history in which a dismal dynamic emerges…Hyman’s history is incisive when it comes to Silicon Valley’s questionable labor practices.” —Los Angeles Review of Books "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." —Publishers Weekly "A revealing study of the "gig economy," which, though it seems new, has long antecedents...[and] a quietly hopeful spin on an economic process that has proved tremendously dislocating for a generation and more of workers." —Kirkus Reviews"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...The book succeeds as a synthesis of economics, sociology, and history by opting for good storytelling over jargon." —Booklist“How employers learned to prefer disposable workers without rights for nearly everyjob could be the subtitle of this stark yet engaging tale. Louis Hyman names the culprits, too: entrepreneurs and consultants who taught corporations to chuck obligations to the people on whom they depend. Companies were able to experiment freely on those left out of the New Deal social contract, turning the vulnerability of some into today’s insecurity and anxiety for all. If the sunny ending sounds like whistling in the graveyard, no matter: this book is a stimulus to start imagining a sustainable economic order for our time.” —Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains “Countering common wisdom, Louis Hyman shows that the norm of steady work has been eroded for decades not by the workings of an abstract market but through the systematic efforts of