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[...] 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 into the final manufactured product. In this way, the assembly line did not introduce a new division of labor between humans and machines so much as it wrested away control over the pace at which a person worked and their ability to coordinate with or delete to others.
at the onset of the industrial revolution
[...] 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 floor. But these approaches did not contend with or even recognize how often women worked on contract through piecework, because factory work was still considered morally suspect for a young, unmarried woman and, practically speaking, took her away from her other full-time job of cooking cleaning, and caring for children and elders at home.
[...] union strategies did not prioritize or recognize the specific burdens or costs women faced leaving contract labor or home-based piecework behind. Unions quickly abandoned their focus on recruiting young women to the factory floor. And none imagined that advocating for gender equality in the home to reduce women's household workoad might be a necessary strategy for unionizing women in the workforce. Instead, they shifted their attention to blocking the uptake of newer technologies that sped up the work pace. [...]
parallels to gig economy today?
also: potentially negative consequences of fighitng to hold back tech advances? what if it makes the employer less competitive?
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 worth noting that paperboys didn't just deliver the news. They served as the primary sales force for papers, and their jobs often put them in physical danger as they made their way through the thick of bustling street traffic. The Supreme Court read the spirit of the FLSA as applying to any worker economically dependent on and producing for another entity. The Heart Corporation, bruised from the Supreme Court's verdict recognizing street corner paperboys as workers deserving of workplace protections under FLSA, lobbied to narrow the definition of "employee" under the Taft-Hartley amendment to WAgner's National Labor Relations Act. Hearst pushed to explicitly exempt independent contractors, working off-site or considered peripheral to business operations. Congress's revisions to the original Wagner Act would instead require courts to use strict tests to classify "common law" employment status rather than assume that businesses hiring people to carry out work counted as workers deserving of fair labor practices and employment benefits.
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 FLSA and the Taft-Hartley Act are clues about mid-20th-century assumptions about which workforces neede dprotection from unemployment and what - or who - seemed safe from automation [...] the FLSA excluded volunteering, what we might think of today as the ubiquituous unpaid college internship. Volunteering was considered apprenticing, core to building one's professional identity. Since medieval times, divinity, medicine, and law, teh so-called "learned professions," were seen as the exclusive paths of the educated classes. These skilled vocations needed no workplace protections. Their advanced degrees insulated them from economic insecurity. That is how a college education came to be seen as a gateway to the middle class for anyone who wanted to leave behind the mines or factories.
[...] The work conditions of the professions, at least in the early days of moder industrial capitalism, did not seem relevant to the debates over FLSA. And so, the Fair Labor Standards Act appied to "any individual employed by an employer" but not to independent contractors or volunteers training to enter the professional class. Both types of workers were considered liminal characters. The contractor was treated like a hammer or mechanical pencil, there only to do an immediate task. Interns, by contrast, were being groomed to step into the corner office someday.
[...] 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 wholesale swapping out of full-time employees for contingent staff was not just the fallout of technological change. She charts the staffing and temp agency sector's growth as its own service industry. What did it sell? The suggestion that young women and others, constrained by family care, limited educational opportunities, or geography, would reduce the companies' costs. Hatton argues that this "liability model," which treats workers as a drag on corporate profits, overtook the "asset model" of employment. [...]
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 eligible to collectively bargain or to push for increasing workers' benefits. Following a largely untested management theory, a wave of corporations in the 1980s cut anything that could be defined as "non-essential business operations" - from cleaning offices to debugging software programs - in order to impress stockholders with their true value, defined in terms of "return on investment" [...] and "core competencies." [...]
i would love to hear the other side of this as well - as in, why did these companies do this? was it in response to pressure from wall street? did a new wave of management consultants or eager HBS grads unilaterally impose these terms? a mix of both?
[...] 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 these permatemps now that they were officially employees of another company. [...] Microsoft argued that these workers had signed contracts indicating that they were temporary workers and not entitled to benefits and were compensated with "higher payer" and "fleixibility". OVer the next few years, Microsoft went to great lengths to differentiate temporary employees from its permanent staff, including different badge colors, different email addresses, lack of discounts at the company store, eliminating parking accessbibility, exclusion from social events, and cerrtainly none of the company's financial and medical benefits.
microsoft 1992 permatemps contractor lawsuit (bug testers). settled out of court.
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 is necessary but is actually money well spent. For all the claims that ghost work can combine algorithms, artificial intelligence, and platform interfaces to replace the company's function as "the entrepreneur-coordinator, who directs production," there is evidence to the contrary. The transaction costs of ghost work don't melt away. Instead they are shifted to the shoulders of requesters and workers. Requesters must juggle all the management that typiaclly comes with scoping a new project and handing it to a new employee. They spend extra time and energy explaining tasks that they thought needed no explication once converted to code and relayed via APIs. Workers pay a disproportionately higher price: they lose their time, even their paychecks, with no opportunity to appeal any mistreatment. Many of the transaction costs passed on to requesters irror those shouldered by workers. Each hurdle faced demonstrates that ghost work isn't working smoothly for anyone involved.
it works well for the founders/invsetors/etc, the only thing that's frictionless is growth of their net worth
[...] Requesters overwhelmingly expected workers to have their own software tools to bring to the job [...] A full-time employee would be given all the software tools necessary to do his or her job. But in the on-demand labor setting, this cost is transferred to the workers. [...] Requesters can improve their bottom line, since they don't have to provide software tools for on-demand workers.
Because platforms get their revenue from the requeters, it is not surprising that they, intentionally or not, confer more market power to requesters. Platforms also have the power to unilaterally decide who does and doesn't hjave access to their platform. [...]
remember who the customer is