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America's Second-largest Employer Is a Temp Agency
cold fjord writes "From the Examiner: '...the second-largest employer in America is Kelly Services, a temporary work provider. ... part-time jobs are at an all-time high, with 28 million Americans now working part-time. ... There are now a record number of Americans with temporary jobs. Approximately 2.7 million, in fact. And the trend has been growing. ... Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States. In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.' The NYT has a chart detailing the problem."
Employers are afraid to commit and invest in their employees any more. I worked at a call center that was a "temp-to-hire" once - they had around 50 full time employees, including the 20-odd folks in management. Another 100 were temp workers who were brought in, worked to the bone until they burned out, then let go. The highest performers (read: the people who didn't screw up) were offered full time positions with the company, or promotions. The need for this could have been alleviated with better training, but training employees is expensive. Better to hire a lot of them short term through a temp agency, see which ones fit in, and just let the others go, in a constant pattern of churn.
I quit that place despite being one of the rare full timers, because I decided I'd much rather work on computers directly than just talk to people about them.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
People have been predicting the wealth economy for some time, but have no clear plan on how to transition to that model.
Here's an opportunity: redefine "full time" to be less than 40 hours. Our productivity is now so high that fewer people need to work, but at the same time we need to employ everyone in order to prevent unrest and revolt.
Productivity is high, so we should have more leisure time. GDP per capita has skyrocketed, it's doubled since about 1990, and the average citizen would get $40,000 per year if output was distributed evenly. That's every man, woman and child - employed or not, and every year.
Corporations have to start spending money on the people instead of cutting people out of production. Better educated workers, happier workers, healthier workers make your business stronger and give better return on investment than rehiring. Much better return than "cost accounting", which aims to make the cheapest product people can tolerate.
Government has to start rerouting wealth from businesses to the people, by way of infrastructure benefits. Free health care and free education, as well as infrastructure projects (national system of renewable power generation, universal internet service, &c) enrich the population without coddling to the lazy.
Production is met by an ever-dwindling need for human interaction. We should embrace this trend in a way that doesn't require armed revolt.
Russell called it a long time ago, and look at where we are now. Sometimes I wonder if we'll really transition to a post-consumerist, post-scarcity society, like Paul Fernhout often describes here, or if we'll keep endlessly inventing jobs and functions that do not add to our lives but are infinitely scalable as long as at least two parts are fueling the market in opposite ways, like advertising, laywering, pateting, lobbying etc.
‘Bingo’: Iowahawk sums up the jobs report in one tweet about Taco Bell
David Burge @iowahawkblog
Unemployment report in a nutshell: the Taco Bell that had 30 40 hour workers now has 40 30 hour workers.
Behind the Dismal Jobs Numbers: The ‘New’ Economy Takes Shape
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Actually, I'd argue that not many people thought that so many employers are immoral shit-sucking assholes who'd intentionally try to screw their employees out of health care. I would never imagined that any business would publicly announce they're trying to fuck over their employees. I'm shocked, quite frankly, at hearing so many businesses declare that they are, in fact, run by immoral fucktards who not only couldn't give two shits about their employees, but actually see no problem with it.
- An employer who pays for health insurance for all of his employees
I don't respond to AC's.
I think this article is exactly about my primary concern with the idea of a return to manufacturing in the US. Most people think China and Mexico's big advantage is cheap labor. But manufacturing's been in my family for a long time and many of my relatives run large plants. The hourly wage of the employees is a factor, but not nearly as important as many people think. The real problem is being able to scale operations up and down quickly. Can I hire 500 people and have them on the line within a month? Equally, can I let go 500 people just as fast? In mexico and china you certainly can. And with the size of their operations there they might be able to shift those people over to something else. In the US with all of our labor laws you can't do that sort of thing quickly and the loss of even a small contract for a manufacturing plant has devastating repercussions on the floor, with salesman scrambling to find new work quickly. Then when you're at your peak you're turning down contracts for fear of employing too many and having to let them go later. I'm not suggesting that or labor laws are bad on the whole, they are good for society just bad for manufacturing plants.