Doug Henwood Wrote:
> >I'm not sure how people are defining contingent work, but MANPOWER, INC., the
> >daily hiring agency used for restaurants and blue collar laboring work is now
> >the largest employer in the united states.
>
> Well, yes, but there's not much rigorous evidence that this is the case.
> Unfortunately, the BLS's study of contingency was done as a supplement to
> the Feb 95 CPS, so there's no earlier data available; we'll see in the
> future just how much it's going up. But proxies - like unwilling part-time
> and temp employment - are not showing anything like the trajectory you'd
> assume from the anecdotal reports. Unwilling part-time work is down as a
> share of total employment, and temp firms account for 10% of job growth in
> this up-cycle (and only 2% of overall employment). Moreover, the ILO's
> study of job tenure and the OECD's of part-time work show no trends over
> time that comport with the journalism and word-of-mouth.
>
> The BLS's definition of contingency is "jobs which are structured to last
> only a limited period of time"; contingent workers "are those that do not
> have an implicit or explicit contract for ongoing employment. They report
> employment by three definitions. Here's table A from their report, which
> shows the percentage of total employment accounted for by each category.
> Unsurprisingly, contingent workers are disporportionally young, female, and
> black. About 30% of the contingent under all three definitions were happy
> with their contingency, and 55-60% preferred permanent work. So by the
> broadest definition, well under 3% of U.S. workers were unwillingly
> contingen in 1995. This all surprised the hell out of me when I read it.
>
> Table A. Contingent workers as a percent of total employment, February 1995
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
> | | % of |
> | Definition and alternative estimates of contingent workers |employed|
> |----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
> | Contingent workers are those who do not have an implicit or | |
> | explicit contract for ongoing employment. Persons who do | |
> | not expect to continue in their jobs for personal reasons | |
> | such as retirement or returning to school are not considered | |
> | contingent workers, provided that they would have the option | |
> | of continuing in the job were it not for these personal | |
> | reasons. | |
> |----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
> | | |
> | Estimate 1 | |
> | | |
> | Wage and salary workers who expect their jobs will last for an | |
> | additional year or less and who had worked at their jobs for 1 | |
> | year or less. Self-employed workers and independent contractors | |
> | are excluded from this estimate. For temporary help and contract | |
> | workers, contingency is based on the expected duration and tenure | |
> | of their employment with the temporary help or contract firm, not | 2.2 |
> | with the specific client to whom they are assigned. | |
> | | |
> | Estimate 2 | |
> | | |
> | Workers including the self-employed and independent contractors | |
> | who expect their employment to last for an additional year or | |
> | less and who had worked at their jobs (or been self-employed) for | |
> | 1 year or less. For temporary help and contract workers, | |
> | contingency is determined on the basis of the expected duration | |
> | and tenure with the client to whom they are assigned, instead of | 2.8 |
> | their tenure with the temporary help or contract firm. | |
> | | |
> | | |
> | Estimate 3 | |
> | | |
> | Workers who do not expect their jobs to last. Wage and salary | |
> | workers are included even if they already had held the job for | |
> | more than 1 year and expect to hold the job for at least an | |
> | additional year. The self-employed and independent contractors | |
> | are included if they expect their employment to last for an | |
> | additional year or less and they had been self-employed or | 4.9 |
> | independent contractors for 1 year or less. | |
> | | |
> |-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Doug
Response:
This is somewhat but not really very interesting. All of this shows
how with the power to define, structure, and categorize along with
the power to frame the "proper questions" and the "proper paremeters
of debate", bourgeois economics and the servants of monopoly capital
in the various agencies of Government and academia can come up with
whatever they want to come up with in terms of formalistic arguments,
equations and "proofs" of their various a priori and contived
assertions and axioms designed to set up their contrived syllogisms
to support their contrived policies to serve the interests of their
masters...
Let them do surveys of workers and determine the percentage of
workers who feel and understand the reality of capitalism: contract
or no contract, their terms and conditions of employment depend
essentially on the profit appetites of capital and the vicissitudes
of capitalism; that no contract has been made that can't be broken,
especially when those breaking the contract have unlimited resources
to ward off litigation, the potential litigants have no resources to
pursue litigation and further the laws were written by and for the
interests of those most likely to break labor contracts; that 10,000
workers may lose their jobs before the boss's snot-nosed kid loses
his Corvette; that thousands of workers can lose their jobs due to
gross mismanagement while the mismanagers bail out with golden
parachutes and go on to mismanage another company with thousands more
workers losing their jobs; that the formalistic equations and derived
statistics from the likes of the BLS are crafted and carried out to
disguise the ugly imperatives, realities and consequences associated
with the vicissitudes of capitalism; etc...
These so-called BLS Stats best belong in a Stats Class on how to
miscategorize, formalize, structure and contrive surveys to yield
contrived results to support contrived assertions and "axioms" to
support contrived syllogisms to support contrived policies to support
some parochial interests and paradigms. There is nothing more to it
in my opinion.
Jim Craven
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