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[...] the 1980s, when temporary staffing agencies like Kelly Girl Service and Manpower contracted out more workers than most companies retained as full-time workers. Manpower's temp pool surpased GM's full-time employees in the 1990s. Sociologist Erin Hatton makes a compelling case that the wholesa…

The erosion of labor protections for workers seen as "unskilled" but working outside of unionized manual jobs moved like water through cracks, exploiting and capitalizing on society's assumptions about whose work needed protection and who was worth protecting. Buried within the exemptions of the FL…

News magnate William Randolph Hearst lost a case in 1944 before the Supreme Court when he failed to convince the court that paperboys were the equivalent of their own bosses, operating as contract workers, exempt from employment labor protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). It's wort…

[...] The largest, most progressive union, the United Garment Workers, organized in 1891, tried to root out what it saw as the "menace of the outworkers" and make them "a coherent part of its growth," but to no avail. Union organizers focused on getting young women to fill vacancies on the factory …

[...] The new asssembly line systems [...] factory owners took control of both the raw materials and the labor "supply chain". Individual workers no longer coordinated production with each other. They were told where to stand, what to do, and how to hand off their contributions to be incorporated i…