The Temping of America

IN THE TERRIBLE HIGHLAND CLEARANCES OF THE 18th century, thousands of Scots were driven from their farms so that landlords might turn the fields over to the mass grazing of sheep, a more efficient and profitable enterprise. The wool business prospered. The Highlanders starved or went to America. It was the end of one way of life. Or the beginning of another. Economics uprooted culture, and changed everything.

A transformation that merciless and profound is occurring in the American workplace. These are the great corporate clearances of the '90s, the ruthless, restructuring efficiencies. The American work force is being downsized and atomized. As the Scottish farmers were torn away from the soil, millions of Americans are being evicted from the working worlds that have sustained them, the jobs that gave them not only wages and health care and pensions but also a context, a sense of self-worth, a kind of identity. Work was the tribe. There were Sears men and GM workers and Anheuser-Busch people. There still are, of course. But their world is different.

Communism deconstructed itself. Capitalism has done something of the same thing to its work force, even while sleekening itself in a Darwinian way. In any case, a new order has in a few short years dismantled the crucial load- bearing traditions of work in America and abrogated its operative myth. In a time of surreal transition, America is working essentially without a social contract, or with one that is daily, deeply violated.

Twenty years ago, Studs Terkel's Working explored the lives of Americans with jobs that seemed like long-term marriages, frustrating, satisfying, boring, rewarding: familiar, anyway, and built on a rock foundation. Careers had a kind of narrative line. It began with something like apprenticeship and then, in the ideal model, proceeded through hard work and merit to raises, promotions, success and eventual retirement with pension. Seniority and experience meant something: work was as close as Americans came to the Confucian. Getting fired was a disgrace, the scarlet letter.

That epoch has passed. America has entered the age of the contingent or temporary worker, of the consultant and subcontractor, of the just-in-time work force -- fluid, flexible, disposable. This is the future. Its message is this: You are on your own. For good (sometimes) and ill (often), the workers of the future will constantly have to sell their skills, invent new relationships with employers who must, themselves, change and adapt constantly in order to survive in a ruthless global market.

This is the new metaphysics of work. Companies are portable, workers are throwaway. The rise of the knowledge economy means a change, in less than 20 years, from an overbuilt system of large, slow-moving economic units to an array of small, widely dispersed economic centers, some as small as the individual boss. In the new economy, geography dissolves, the highways are electronic. Even Wall Street no longer has a reason to be on Wall Street. Companies become concepts and in their dematerialization, become strangely conscienceless. And jobs are almost as susceptible as electrons to vanishing into thin air.

The American economy has turned into a bewilderment of good news, horrible news, depending on your point of view. After two years of record profits, the Bank of America recently announced that thousands of employees will become part-timers, with few benefits. Beneath some of the statistics of economic recovery lie stress and pain.

The Industrial Revolution was inevitable, even if the Luddites howled and broke the machines. There are some good economic reasons for a current restructuring, long overdue, of the American workplace. But the human costs are enormous. Some profound betrayal of the American dynamic itself (work hard, obey the rules, succeed) runs through this process like a computer virus.

There may be an analogue to this betrayal in the way that the U.S. fought the war in Vietnam. Robert McNamara's Pentagon became intoxicated by computer efficiencies and pseudo precisions and began sending soldiers out to the war alone instead of in cohesive units -- the confused young soldiers going like temps dispatched to a 365-day jungle job and then coming home alone. All technique, no human wisdom. Thus vanished esprit de corps, team spirit, the intangibles that are indispensable to winning. An economy too much addicted to treating its workers like interchangeable, disposable grunts, such as Kelly Girls and cannon fodder, may find itself succeeding about as well as America won its war in Vietnam.

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CAPTION: Since 1982 temporary employment has increased almost 250%

while all employment has grown less than 20%

In 1988 contingent workers were about a quarter of the labor force

By 2000, they are expected to be half of it