For further clues to where the trend towards disposable labor is headed, we turn to two recent pieces in the WSJ that were published, coincidentally, on the same day.
The first is an op-ed by Jody Greenstone Miller, founder and CEO of the Business Talent Group, a temp agency for the executive and managerial set. Ms. Miller declares that “the surge in temporary workers is not only good news for the economy, it’s the future of the 21st century labor market.” The ongoing conversion of all kinds of worker to perma-temps is simply the “latest sign of our economy’s endless capacity for renewal and innovation.” She argues it’s good not only for firms but for individuals, who can exercise their talents without being restricted to one employer.
Ms. Miller may have a personal–we won’t say crass–reason for her exuberance: “Amid the worst recession in decades, our business is up 70%.” Yet we’re not inclined to dismiss her argument for this reason alone; as we’ll describe in another post, we actually find some aspects of it quite compelling.
For now we point the reader to a report in the same issue of the WSJ which describes a different kind of perma-temp existence than the one envisioned by Ms. Miller, one that may be characterized more often by exhaustion than by renewal.
We find the case of Marty Rasmussen, a former bank executive in California, especially poignant. He and his wife earned a combined income of more than $250,000 a year before he was laid off. Mr. Rasmussen has been reduced to selling furniture he used to make as a hobby. This new vocation has not paid as well as his earlier one, earning him just $11,000 last year. His wife also lost her job and now gets unemployment benefits.
We assume that Mr. Rasmussen is not fundamentally different from the kinds of “top business talent” advised by Ms. Miller, and can’t help wondering what he would make of her celebration of the “new relationship between talent and firms” exposed by this recession.
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