Used to be a Reason Why We Had Unions

Until we found out that workers grew more prosperous without them:

[T]he temp craze has expanded from air-conditioned offices to warehouses and construction sites. In 1990, a year after Labor Ready was founded, clerical workers made up 42 percent of the temp workforce, with blue-collar workers comprising about 25 percent. By 2000, the numbers were flipped, a phenomenon driven by the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs. In 1989, according to a forthcoming article in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, only 1 in 43 manufacturing jobs were temporary. By 2006, 1 in 11 were.

As the prospects for stable blue-collar employment soured, Labor Ready's sales soared. In 1991, it had eight stores and booked a modest $6 million in revenue. The company went public in 1998, and by 2000 it had nearly $1 billion in revenue and 852 offices, covering every state in the nation, plus outlets in Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom.

Labor Ready had other trends on its side as well. Welstad credited welfare reform with dumping more cheap workers at his door: Depending on the state, somewhere between 15 and 40 percent of former welfare recipients found work as temps. It certainly didn't hurt that people who'd gotten tangled up in the drug war were finding regular employment was hard to come by [...]

"They get stuck and then adjust to it," says David Van Arsdale, a professor of sociology at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, New York, who studies industrial temp agencies. As part of his research, Van Arsdale worked for three summers at Labor Ready, and rarely saw anyone land a permanent position. "Their whole lives get structured around the ephemeral nature of the work," he says. "Companies use temps precisely to rid themselves of all the obligations of employment."

---Vitelius