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Ghost work economies sell themselves as software that can eliminate the expensive frictions of searching, matching, training, communicating with, and retaining workers. Yet, as Coase might have warned, communication and coordination among workers, and between workers and their employers, not only i…

[...] Microsoft outsourced the HR and payroll of its temporary workers to professional staffing agencies, firing workers who refused to be "converted" to temporary status. These agencies provided cheaper labor for Microsoft, as the company was not required to provide benefits or stock options for t…

But outsourcing was never simply about cost cutting. It was also about the growing resistance to unionization and evading long-standing labor regulations. As companies expanded their reliance on a far-flung network of contingent staff, they shrank the number of on-site, full-time employees who were…

[...] 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…