Disposable Workers

Among the many upheavals of the transition from manufacturing orientation to an information orientation of developed economies over the past several decades has been a dramatic and fundamental transformation of the employment relationship. The construct of the disposable worker has gained popularity in both popular and academic circles in explaining the role of the worker in this new relationship, capturing the sense in which the bond between employee and employer has become increasingly short term as employers have extended the concept of just-in-time manufacturing to the employment relationship, resulting in both an increase in temporary and contingent labor and an overall decline in job tenure and long-term employment. This shift has led the employment relationship to be defined not by mutual loyalty and the promise of stability, but 185 [Page 185]rather by employability, or the ability of workers to secure their next job, a shift with consequences for both worker and employer.

Disposable work has taken a variety of forms. Notably, in the early 1980s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics began for the first time to track displaced workers—workers who lose their job because of a plant or company closing, because of a lack of work, or because of the elimination of their position or shift. Displaced workers originally began to appear in the blue-collar sector in the wake of large-scale factory automation but by the 1990s had also expanded to the white-collar workforce through downsizing and reengineering.

Beyond displaced workers, other workers who can be classified as disposable include temporary workers, or those who are employed by a firm that contracts out their workers to other firms on an as-needed basis; contract or freelance workers, or self-employed workers who contract with firms on a contingent basis; and involuntary part-time workers. Although some workers might choose to work in temporary, contract, or part-time relationships, these forms can be seen as disposable when they are simultaneously involuntary and nonstandard. The involuntary nature of disposability captures the social anxieties attendant to the construct. As Charles Conrad and Scott Poole have observed, this disposability refers as much to cultural perceptions of relatively newfound insecurity and instability in the employment relationship as it does the broader economic reality. The disposable worker is as much an economic descriptor as it is a cultural touchstone, a reference point against which to track dramatic shifts in the employment relationship over the past several decades. Although these shifts have unfolded in a slow, inexorable fashion, they have been brought into particularly sharp relief over the course of the past three economic recessions, each of which has been marked by the appearance of a “jobless recovery.”