Recent law school graduates often work as temporary attorneys, but law firm layoffs and downsizing have strengthened the temporary attorney industry. Cheaper by the Hour is the first book-length account of these workers.
Drawing from participant observation and interviews, Robert A. Brooks provides a richly detailed ethnographic account of freelance attorneys in Washington, DC. He places their document review work in the larger context of the deprofessionalization of skilled labor and considers how professionals relegated to temporary jobs feel diminished, degraded, or demeaned by work that is often tedious, repetitive, and well beneath their abilities.
Brooks documents how firms break a lawyer's work into discrete components that require less skill to realize maximum profits. Moreover, he argues that information technology and efficiency demands are further stratifying the profession and creating a new underclass of lawyers who do low-end commodity work.
"So this is where the brain starts to shut down and that which we treasure most, our personal identities, begins to slip away....I suppose I should be thankful; it's a paycheck." With this disturbing sentiment, Kevin Henson begins a voyage into the world of "the temp." For several years while a graduate student, Henson logged in thousands of hours as a temporary worker in offices throughout Chicago's Loop. Those experiences, and numerous interviews with other temps and temporary counselors, create a vivid and often disheartening picture of working 9 to 5 behind the receptionist's desk, telephone console, or data-entry terminal.
In their own voices, the temps in this book lament the frequently demeaning and mundane nature of many assignments:
•"You're not paid to think."
"Temps don't have names; they are just 'the temp.'"
"They always harass me...because I just wear a sweater and slacks."
"The worst part is telling people what you do. They always ask 'When are you going to get a real job?'"
Where the temporary service industry is quick to extol the virtues of temp work—mainly its flexibility—Henson and his cast of temps reveal the tacit pressure to persevere through an unpleasant assignment, to accept every assignment offered, and to readjust personal lives to do so. Outsiders to the established office culture and hierarchy, most temps are asked to do low-skill work and leave more detailed or complicated tasks for the return of the permanent employee.
Whether temp life is a preferred choice or grudgingly accepted as the last option when "real" or permanent work is unavailable, all temps must confront issues of gender, identity, and self-esteem. Henson examines these issues, documenting the concerns and interpretations of temp workers about their own work lives.
Everyone knows that work in America is not what it used to be. Layoffs, outsourcing, contingent work, disappearing career ladders—these are the new workplace realities for an increasing number of people. But why? In The Temp Economy, Erin Hatton takes one of the best-known icons of the new economy—the temp industry—and finds that it is more than just a symbol of this degradation of work. The temp industry itself played an active role in this decline—and not just for temps. Industry leaders started by inventing the "Kelly Girl," exploiting 1950s gender stereotypes to justify low wages, minimal benefits, and chronic job insecurity. But they did not stop with Kelly Girls. From selling human"business machines" in the 1970s to "permatemps" in the 1990s, the temp industry relentlessly portrayed workers as profit-busting liabilities that hurt companies' bottom lines even in boom times. These campaigns not only legitimized the widespread use of temps, they also laid the cultural groundwork for a new corporate ethos of ruthless cost cutting and mass layoffs.
Succinct, highly readable, and drawn from a vast historical record of industry documents, The Temp Economy is a one-stop resource for anyone interested in the temp industry or the degradation of work in postwar America.
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