The Jobs Crisis and the Art of Flexible Labor
Hundreds of Twin Cities workers learn how to be commodities.
By Dan DiMaggio
Dollars & Sense
January/February 2011
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/
1010dimaggio.html

The unemployment crisis in this country coincides with
a decades-long growth in employment by temp agencies,
making millions of Americans' search for secure,
decent-paying jobs even more difficult. The bizarre
experience I had recently along with over 500 other
workers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area sheds some
light on many aspects of the current jobs crisis and
the growing expectations of absolute "flexibility" if
you want a job.

On Sunday, October 3, an ad in the Star Tribune from
the temp agency ProStaff advertised 300 immediate
call-center positions. By Wednesday they had upped this
number, hiring 550 unemployed and underemployed Twin
Cities residents to fill these jobs. The majority were
people of color, including hundreds of African
Americans--no surprise given that as of 2009
African-American unemployment (20.4%) in the Twin
Cities stood at three times that of whites (6.6%). We
were promised work through October 22, with the caveat
that we must be "flexible flexible flexible."

In the middle of the night Thursday, after four hours
of training and one day of work, we all received a
dreaded phone call: our jobs were gone. No one had been
calling the call center about the class action
settlement we were hired to take questions about. So
just like that, over 500 people were returned to the
ranks of the jobless.

We woke up Friday morning to headlines announcing the
loss of an additional 95,000 jobs nationally, with the
unemployment rate steady at 9.6% and the
underemployment rate rising to 17.1%. Saturday's Star
Tribune seemed to mock us with the headline "For
Jobless, No Relief," a good summary of our lives this
week.

Is it me, or is it a sign of just how bad the jobs
crisis is in this country that a temp agency promising
$12 an hour can hire 550 workers in two days? And they
no doubt could have hired a few thousand more if
needed.

The woman working next to me, a young mother of two,
said she has never seen it this bad in the fourteen
years since she came to the United States from
Ethiopia. After working for years at Starbucks, as a
parking lot attendant, and in other low-paying jobs,
she's been out of work for the past four months,
getting no calls back no matter where she applies.

Anyone without a job will report similar experiences.
The only option for many people has become working
through temp agencies like ProStaff. Among the 64,000
private sector jobs gained in September, "temporary
help services accounted for most of" the 28,000 jobs
added in professional and business services. The mantra
of these temp agencies is "flexibility," which means
you shouldn't be surprised if you are promised three
weeks of work and you only work one day.

"Flexibility" means desperation, disposability,
accommodation, quiescence--a willingness to accept
whatever they might throw at you. Being "flexible"
means acting as much as possible like a commodity
rather than a human being. A commodity is a thing to be
bought and sold, like a piece of meat, an ear of corn,
a roll of toilet paper. Commodities don't complain.
They don't have families or human lives. They don't
write articles denouncing temp agencies.

"Flexibility" was on full display in the 1.5 days the
550 of us worked. I'm still not sure whether this was
an actual job or just some sort of scam by ProStaff and
unknown higher powers to train 550 people in the art of
flexibility--a seminar on "How To Be a Commodity 101."

First, after interviewing for the job on Monday, we
were told to show up early Tuesday morning for eight
hours of training. So we arranged babysitters,
reshuffled schedules at our other jobs, and canceled
meetings and classes. Then on Monday evening, we were
called and told training had been moved to 1pm on
Tuesday. So we rescheduled everything again, in order
to dutifully display our flexibility.

For training, we weren't supposed to leave until 8, or
9, or 10pm, depending on which member of the ProStaff
team you'd talked to the night before, but when we
arrived Tuesday at 1pm, the company smiled and told us,
"Don't worry, we'll have you out of here by 5pm!" As if
anyone without a job wants to make less
money--especially when they've already paid for a
babysitter. This "flexible" approach to time is
entirely one-sided; ProStaff's time sheets are
calculated down to the second.

At some point during training, we also learned that
most of the shifts we'd signed up for had been changed.
And that we were going to be working weekends, despite
explicitly being told during our interviews that this
was a Monday through Friday job. Then we found out that
the actual job wouldn't start until Thursday, though we
were repeatedly told that we had to be available
immediately. That's the thing about temp work--you have
to always be available, able to "flexibly" adjust to
all your employers' whims. In return, they don't have
to guarantee you anything.

The supervisor in charge of training laughed whenever
she repeated her favorite sentence: "You must be
FLEXIBLE, FLEXIBLE, FLEXIBLE." I'm surprised she didn't
do the temp agencies' version of the Wal-Mart cheer:
"Give me an F!--F! Give me an L!--L! ... What's that
spell? FLEXIBLE!" Eventually she realized she might be
offending some people, that our human bone structure
sets real limits to our flexibility. She apologized by
saying, "We're sorry, this is just the nature of this
work." This phrase excuses any and all behavior by
businesses that hire temps.

Yes, but you see, ma'am, somebody made things this way.
"The nature of the work" is dependent upon finding a
workforce desperate enough to do it. Somebody made it
so that there are 550 "flexible" people out there,
willing to come in and work for $12 an hour and no
benefits on a moment's notice. Somebody created this
pool of labor that your company uses to make its
profits. That somebody includes ProStaff and other temp
agencies (though this isn't meant to take any blame
away from the rest of corporate America and its hired
political representatives). As professors Jamie Peck
and Nik Theodore wrote in 2005, "The Temporary Services
Industry has become an important part of the
infrastructure of the U.S. labor market, facilitating
new kinds of employment contracting on a very large
scale, and reshaping workplace and market norms in the
process." It's only gotten worse since then. This is
not a good thing for workers.

You have to wonder how far American workers will
continue to bend before they either break or snap back.
There are going to be a lot of people out of work for a
really long time. There are currently 6.1 million
long-term unemployed workers, meaning people who have
been out of a job for more than 27 weeks. There are no
signs this number will abate anytime soon.

What can be done? In our one day together, my co-worker
and I discussed the need for a real Union of the
Unemployed. It didn't take me eight hours to convince
her that this was needed--after about 30 seconds, she
readily agreed, despite never having been politically
active before. We were all set to gather the e-mails
and phone numbers of as many of our co-workers as
possible the next day. That is, until our plans were
foiled when we received the middle-of-the-night phone
call informing us we were laid off. Perhaps someone had
overheard us.

But this seems like exactly what is needed right now.
With one in ten Americans without a job, and one in six
underemployed, that means nearly every family is
affected one way or another. It's long past due for
tabling on street corners, leafleting outside
unemployment offices and temp agencies, and organizing
a real Unemployed Workers' Union. All those people
forced to work as temps, or working part-time when they
want full-time jobs should be invited to join. This
union could act as an organizing center, a support
group, a place to put serious pressure on the
politicians to do something to address the jobs
crisis--something other than tax credits, that is.

The alternative is to leave it up to the government and
private sector and to hope that things will turn
themselves around. Don't hold your breath. CEOs at the
50 companies who laid off the most workers earned an
average of $12 million in 2009, 42% more than CEOs of
other S&P 500 companies.

We can't accept profit as the sole determinant of
whether we are going to work or not. Whether the temp
agencies or big companies like it or not, we are not
commodities, but human beings, who need to eat, drink,
sleep, love, take care of our kids, and live.

We should demand a jobs program that puts us to work
doing something useful, like greening our cities and
towns, or teaching English as a Second Language (ESL).
For the last few weeks, I have been volunteering as a
teacher in an ESL program in South Minneapolis. Almost
all of the ESL teachers in programs like this around
the country are unpaid volunteers, and the few paid
teachers and staff are overburdened. Wouldn't it make
sense to expand funding for these programs and hire on
thousands of people to teach ESL, which would help
integrate the millions of immigrants into our society?
Couldn't there be money for a language interchange, so
that more Americans could learn Spanish or Chinese? Of
course then we might stop hating each other and blaming
immigrants for the lack of jobs, removing an important
weapon from the divide-and-conquer arsenal of big
business.

If we get ourselves organized, maybe the next time 500
of us receive a call in the middle of the night
informing us that we've been laid off, we can produce a
better response than just rolling over and going back
to sleep. It's long past time to wake ourselves up from
this nightmare. Temps of the world unite! We have
nothing to lose but our flexibility!

Dan DiMaggio is an independent writer, temp worker, and
member of Socialist Alternative in Minneapolis, Minn.
He has an MA in History from Tufts University and was
an activist with the Harvard Living Wage Campaign.

SOURCES: Algernon Austin, "Uneven Pain: Unemployment by
Metropolitan Area and Race," Economic Policy Institute,
epi.org, August 2010; Bureau of Labor Statistics,
August 2010; "Temporary downturn? Temporary staffing in
the recession and the jobless recovery," Focus, Spring
2005; Melly, Alazr

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