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I very briefly worked a job like this when I was in college. I would work the concession stands at a huge football stadium with around 1,000 temporary workers o

I very briefly worked a job like this when I was in college. I would work the concession stands at a huge football stadium with around 1,000 temporary workers on a given game day. The wage and hours were terrible, but it was the absolute dehumanization that stuck with me. No body knew your name or particularly cared. You would walk in during the morning, flash your badge and get assigned to a particular stand. Every day it was brand new people who you've never met before with a brand new manager. There was obviously no room to move up, because you never had a chance to build a track record with anyone. There was also just plain disrespect on the part of the company towards its workers. We would spend 2-3 hours after the game just waiting for permission to go home. I can't imagine spending much of my life in a job like that, it was just horrible. But clearly there were enough people who had to do it, because there were many 40 year olds I worked with. People who've never worked these jobs tend to read this article and assume that these articles have a hidden agenda: raising the minimum wage or some kind of socialist initiative. I read it differently, as a reminder of the depressing underside of the US economy.

smacktoward 13y ago
> The wage and hours were terrible, but it was the absolute dehumanization that stuck with me. No body knew your name or particularly cared. You would walk in during the morning, flash your badge and get assigned to a particular stand. Every day it was brand new people who you've never met before with a brand new manager. It's worth remembering that when CEOs talk about flexibility, this is what they are talking about: interchangeable workers, who can be swapped in and out (and thrown in the bin) like interchangeable parts.
- Hovertruck 13y ago
  That might be true sometimes, but it depends on the expectation. If I have a team of great developers, I'd expect to be able to put any of them on anything and walk away with something great in the end knowing that they brought their expertise and best ideas.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    The only difference between those "great developers" and those replaceable workers is that corporate America hasn't figured out how to make software developers into interchangeable cogs yet. But don't fret, people are working on it. There is an entire industry whose job it is to figure out how to extract the necessary labor for any particular function from a workforce that isn't skilled or happy or otherwise invested in their work.
    - Hovertruck 13y ago
      Sure they have. Look at banks and other major enterprises, it's exactly the same. My point isn't about engineers; the same can be said of architects or designers or even middle managers. If you have a team that you trust, having any number and grouping of them able to come together around a problem will produce results. A team being "flexible" does not make them "cogs".
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
        It's the difference between a person being flexible and an organisation or process being flexible. Many organisations don't want to rely on a handful of supermen who solve all of their problems as such people may become indispensable and then demand higher wages or go to a competitor. They would rather break their processes down into a bunch of specialized tasks that require few skills so that new workers can be popped in and out quickly.
        yummyfajitas 13y ago
        In much the same way, most devops guys want to spin up identical commodity EC2 instances deployed via a script, with hostnames like hypst-streamer-m00237. Like it or not, that's how you scale. The wage level is somewhat orthogonal to this - doctors are generally interchangeable cogs, but they get paid well. The key point is avoiding single points of failure.
        13y ago
stinkytaco 13y ago
I agree with you, but there is another side to the temp economy: http://www.theonion.com/articles/temp-hides-fun-fulfilling-life-from-rest-of-office,49/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/temp-hides-fun-fulfilling-l... I realize that's a joke, but it's a joke I and many people I know have lived. It's a cultural notion that we need to get a bunch of fulfillment from our jobs. Though I now have a fulfilling job, I was probably the happiest when I just had a job to make a few bucks and didn't take home the worries of knowledge work. Temp work was a good option because there was no responsibility and if I didn't want to go to work, I didn't. I'm not saying that treating workers as animals is OK or that all temp workers are living a life of bliss – this article show most aren’t -- but there is certainly another side to the story.
- regomodo 13y ago
  It wasn't too long ago i worked long hours in removals. It still remains the only job (among quite a few) i've had that day to day I happily felt something was achieved and didn't go home drained. [edit] I've been working as an EE/SE for the last 4 years.
chunkyslink 13y ago
> raising the minimum wage or some kind of socialist initiative What would be wrong with that anyway?
- asperous 13y ago
  Money doesn't come from nothing, there are side effects of raising the minimum wage. Besides the fact that a small percentage of US work force are actually paid minimum, most more or less than it.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    We can reduce CEO compensation then. There's your money from something.
    - danielweber 13y ago
      Although CEO pay has lots of problems, that money is coming from shareholders, not employees. Picking WalMart (just because they are such an icon of this), if you zero'd out their CEO pay and distributed it to employees, each employee would see a raise of 20 cents a week.
    - yummyfajitas 13y ago
      CEO pay is generally an insignificant fraction of labor costs. Suppose we split the pay of Walmart's CEO (about $20M) between Walmart's 2M employees. That's $10/year per employee.
      - wavefunction 13y ago
        Sure, if you apply it in such a simplistic manner. Why would you give $10 to the guys making 6 figures as well? Whatever, Walmart encourages its employees to apply for food-stamps and other transfer payments so their economics are already all f'd up.
        13y ago
clarkm 13y ago
I also briefly had a temp job like this when I was in high school. I worked at an Acme Brick manufacturing plant one summer. I'd show up around 5:30 every morning not sure if I was going to sweep the plant floor all day or stack the bricks that had just come out of the kiln. While I was hired through a temp agency, I was at least had a guaranteed spot at work each day. I can't imagine what it must be like to have to wait in limbo every morning. The worst part wasn't the physical labor, it was the atmosphere. Never mind the fact that I was pretty much the only English speaker there, the other workers didn't even talk to each other. We'd go on the 30 minute lunch break at 11, and they'd all pull out their lunchboxes and eat in complete silence. Everything was so somber -- it was like everyone had the life sucked out of them.
13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
> minimum wage or some kind of socialist initiative The socialist initiative we need is to shut down unskilled immigration entirely. Read the article; they're all Hispanic. These people's plight is going to be made even worse by the coming wave of even greater unskilled immigration promised by the senate bill. This is why Caesar Chavez was vehemently anti-immigration.
- Kurtz79 13y ago
  "The socialist initiative we need is to shut down unskilled immigration entirely." This is the exact opposite of a "socialist" initative. Either you are being ironic or do not really know in what sense "socialist" is being used here. Either way, feels kind of cheap considering that unskilled migration has historically been one of the driving forces behind US growth and progress, and that many first class US citizens today are probably descendants of some of those migrants.
  - 13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
    I'm actually curious why you associate open borders with socialism/communism. That's usually considered an anarcho-capitalist position. Pro-worker policies like organized labor and immigration restriction are historically associated with the left.
    - eru 13y ago
      Maybe he's a European leftie? They were historically much more internationalist.
    - krakensden 13y ago
      In the US at least, the strongest anti-immigration sentiment usually comes from the right, for the usual boring list of xenophobic reasons.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      Actual anarchists are socialist/communist, and quite often use anti-borders slogans. Not to mention standby organizations like No One Is Illegal.. Furthermore, one of the fundamental tenets of communism is a stateless society, so there's that. And many communists thought it was one of the more important initial goals, hence 'one world communism.'
cperry 13y ago
Same here. I worked as a temp one summer during college (for two agencies). The dehumanization was absolutely the worst part: at one point I was staffed at a warehouse on a line shipping vitamins to people across the US. We mostly worked in awkward silence, as fast as we possibly could. This was punctuated by periods where a manager would gather and berate us for going too slowly. My other favorite experience was working for a large energy drink supplier (you've heard of them), transferring cartons of drinks from pallets to other, differently-sized pallets, while 2-3 dudes in polos sat in a corner and chatted, occasionally laughing. It gave me chills to read this and remember what it's like to work harder than you ever have before, and still be treated as a nameless soulless entity.
vabmit 13y ago
I worked for two different Kelly Services offices in Florida (Largo/St. Pete and Pensacola (iirc)) in the 1990's and it was nothing like the article. I actually had a good experience. I worked similar jobs to the ones mentioned in the article (warehouse, plastics manufacturing, construction, moving furniture, etc.) I always transported my self to the job sites and never found no work when I got there. The pay was above minimum and I would specifically ask for 3rd shift work (because it paid a 50% premium). There were some jobs that were always "temp" - like one time government construction contracts. But, usually the way the process worked at that time was that employers were basically using Kelly to "screen" workers. They'd bring you in as a temp. and after six months if you were still there they'd transition you to permanent position. If they didn't asked you to come back as a temp, Kelly would just send you somewhere else. Sometimes, you'd not get asked back due to an inability to do the job (I once wasn't because I was asked to hand paint the buttons for tv remotes and just didn't have the dexterity for that) but usually it was because of a chronic problem. As you can imagine with people working temp jobs many had "issues". Plenty of people missed work because they were arrested for DUI's or drug related crime the night before. Some had their probation violated. Several showed up drunk or high. One guy had a medical issue (epilepsy) and had a seizure on the factory floor while operating heavy machinery. Using temps let the companies easily handle those types of problems with out interrupting their business. Part of it was not having to involve HR in the "firing" process by just letting the shift supervisor and Kelly handle it. But, it was also that they could just easily get a different temp. There was no need to put an add in the paper and have a person interviewed and entered into the payroll system etc. I guess it's possible that things have gotten much worse since I worked for Kelly. Or, that things may be different in poor US inner cities (which I make it a point to stay away from). But, it's probably just some sensationalism in the writing of the article and some exaggerated hearsay from the temps. Notice that there's no pictures or any other evidence like that of the articles' most egregious statements.

smacktoward 13y ago

> The wage and hours were terrible, but it was the absolute dehumanization that stuck with me. No body knew your name or particularly cared. You would walk in during the morning, flash your badge and get assigned to a particular stand. Every day it was brand new people who you've never met before with a brand new manager. It's worth remembering that when CEOs talk about flexibility, this is what they are talking about: interchangeable workers, who can be swapped in and out (and thrown in the bin) like interchangeable parts.

Hovertruck 13y ago
That might be true sometimes, but it depends on the expectation. If I have a team of great developers, I'd expect to be able to put any of them on anything and walk away with something great in the end knowing that they brought their expertise and best ideas.
- rayiner 13y ago
  The only difference between those "great developers" and those replaceable workers is that corporate America hasn't figured out how to make software developers into interchangeable cogs yet. But don't fret, people are working on it. There is an entire industry whose job it is to figure out how to extract the necessary labor for any particular function from a workforce that isn't skilled or happy or otherwise invested in their work.
  - Hovertruck 13y ago
    Sure they have. Look at banks and other major enterprises, it's exactly the same. My point isn't about engineers; the same can be said of architects or designers or even middle managers. If you have a team that you trust, having any number and grouping of them able to come together around a problem will produce results. A team being "flexible" does not make them "cogs".
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      It's the difference between a person being flexible and an organisation or process being flexible. Many organisations don't want to rely on a handful of supermen who solve all of their problems as such people may become indispensable and then demand higher wages or go to a competitor. They would rather break their processes down into a bunch of specialized tasks that require few skills so that new workers can be popped in and out quickly.
      - yummyfajitas 13y ago
        In much the same way, most devops guys want to spin up identical commodity EC2 instances deployed via a script, with hostnames like hypst-streamer-m00237. Like it or not, that's how you scale. The wage level is somewhat orthogonal to this - doctors are generally interchangeable cogs, but they get paid well. The key point is avoiding single points of failure.
        13y ago

stinkytaco 13y ago

I agree with you, but there is another side to the temp economy: http://www.theonion.com/articles/temp-hides-fun-fulfilling-life-from-rest-of-office,49/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/temp-hides-fun-fulfilling-l... I realize that's a joke, but it's a joke I and many people I know have lived. It's a cultural notion that we need to get a bunch of fulfillment from our jobs. Though I now have a fulfilling job, I was probably the happiest when I just had a job to make a few bucks and didn't take home the worries of knowledge work. Temp work was a good option because there was no responsibility and if I didn't want to go to work, I didn't. I'm not saying that treating workers as animals is OK or that all temp workers are living a life of bliss – this article show most aren’t -- but there is certainly another side to the story.

regomodo 13y ago
It wasn't too long ago i worked long hours in removals. It still remains the only job (among quite a few) i've had that day to day I happily felt something was achieved and didn't go home drained. [edit] I've been working as an EE/SE for the last 4 years.

chunkyslink 13y ago

> raising the minimum wage or some kind of socialist initiative What would be wrong with that anyway?

asperous 13y ago
Money doesn't come from nothing, there are side effects of raising the minimum wage. Besides the fact that a small percentage of US work force are actually paid minimum, most more or less than it.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  We can reduce CEO compensation then. There's your money from something.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    Although CEO pay has lots of problems, that money is coming from shareholders, not employees. Picking WalMart (just because they are such an icon of this), if you zero'd out their CEO pay and distributed it to employees, each employee would see a raise of 20 cents a week.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    CEO pay is generally an insignificant fraction of labor costs. Suppose we split the pay of Walmart's CEO (about $20M) between Walmart's 2M employees. That's $10/year per employee.
    - wavefunction 13y ago
      Sure, if you apply it in such a simplistic manner. Why would you give $10 to the guys making 6 figures as well? Whatever, Walmart encourages its employees to apply for food-stamps and other transfer payments so their economics are already all f'd up.
      - 13y ago

clarkm 13y ago

I also briefly had a temp job like this when I was in high school. I worked at an Acme Brick manufacturing plant one summer. I'd show up around 5:30 every morning not sure if I was going to sweep the plant floor all day or stack the bricks that had just come out of the kiln. While I was hired through a temp agency, I was at least had a guaranteed spot at work each day. I can't imagine what it must be like to have to wait in limbo every morning. The worst part wasn't the physical labor, it was the atmosphere. Never mind the fact that I was pretty much the only English speaker there, the other workers didn't even talk to each other. We'd go on the 30 minute lunch break at 11, and they'd all pull out their lunchboxes and eat in complete silence. Everything was so somber -- it was like everyone had the life sucked out of them.

13b9f227ecf0 13y ago

> minimum wage or some kind of socialist initiative The socialist initiative we need is to shut down unskilled immigration entirely. Read the article; they're all Hispanic. These people's plight is going to be made even worse by the coming wave of even greater unskilled immigration promised by the senate bill. This is why Caesar Chavez was vehemently anti-immigration.

Kurtz79 13y ago
"The socialist initiative we need is to shut down unskilled immigration entirely." This is the exact opposite of a "socialist" initative. Either you are being ironic or do not really know in what sense "socialist" is being used here. Either way, feels kind of cheap considering that unskilled migration has historically been one of the driving forces behind US growth and progress, and that many first class US citizens today are probably descendants of some of those migrants.
- 13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
  I'm actually curious why you associate open borders with socialism/communism. That's usually considered an anarcho-capitalist position. Pro-worker policies like organized labor and immigration restriction are historically associated with the left.
  - eru 13y ago
    Maybe he's a European leftie? They were historically much more internationalist.
  - krakensden 13y ago
    In the US at least, the strongest anti-immigration sentiment usually comes from the right, for the usual boring list of xenophobic reasons.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    Actual anarchists are socialist/communist, and quite often use anti-borders slogans. Not to mention standby organizations like No One Is Illegal.. Furthermore, one of the fundamental tenets of communism is a stateless society, so there's that. And many communists thought it was one of the more important initial goals, hence 'one world communism.'

cperry 13y ago

Same here. I worked as a temp one summer during college (for two agencies). The dehumanization was absolutely the worst part: at one point I was staffed at a warehouse on a line shipping vitamins to people across the US. We mostly worked in awkward silence, as fast as we possibly could. This was punctuated by periods where a manager would gather and berate us for going too slowly. My other favorite experience was working for a large energy drink supplier (you've heard of them), transferring cartons of drinks from pallets to other, differently-sized pallets, while 2-3 dudes in polos sat in a corner and chatted, occasionally laughing. It gave me chills to read this and remember what it's like to work harder than you ever have before, and still be treated as a nameless soulless entity.

vabmit 13y ago

I worked for two different Kelly Services offices in Florida (Largo/St. Pete and Pensacola (iirc)) in the 1990's and it was nothing like the article. I actually had a good experience. I worked similar jobs to the ones mentioned in the article (warehouse, plastics manufacturing, construction, moving furniture, etc.) I always transported my self to the job sites and never found no work when I got there. The pay was above minimum and I would specifically ask for 3rd shift work (because it paid a 50% premium). There were some jobs that were always "temp" - like one time government construction contracts. But, usually the way the process worked at that time was that employers were basically using Kelly to "screen" workers. They'd bring you in as a temp. and after six months if you were still there they'd transition you to permanent position. If they didn't asked you to come back as a temp, Kelly would just send you somewhere else. Sometimes, you'd not get asked back due to an inability to do the job (I once wasn't because I was asked to hand paint the buttons for tv remotes and just didn't have the dexterity for that) but usually it was because of a chronic problem. As you can imagine with people working temp jobs many had "issues". Plenty of people missed work because they were arrested for DUI's or drug related crime the night before. Some had their probation violated. Several showed up drunk or high. One guy had a medical issue (epilepsy) and had a seizure on the factory floor while operating heavy machinery. Using temps let the companies easily handle those types of problems with out interrupting their business. Part of it was not having to involve HR in the "firing" process by just letting the shift supervisor and Kelly handle it. But, it was also that they could just easily get a different temp. There was no need to put an add in the paper and have a person interviewed and entered into the payroll system etc. I guess it's possible that things have gotten much worse since I worked for Kelly. Or, that things may be different in poor US inner cities (which I make it a point to stay away from). But, it's probably just some sensationalism in the writing of the article and some exaggerated hearsay from the temps. Notice that there's no pictures or any other evidence like that of the articles' most egregious statements.