Below, Paul Osterman shares five key insights from his new book, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment.
1. Companies do not want employees
Employers want to get out from under the obligations they owe their workforce. Companies want bodies to do the work, but they increasingly don’t want those bodies to be employees.
Disposable workers are everywhere nowadays. The concierge who greets me when I leave my condo in the morning works for a contracting company, not the building. When I do an interview at a downtown office building, that building is being cleaned by contractors. The person indexing my new book is a freelancer. If I get into an accident, the nurse who might treat me in the emergency room is possibly a traveling contractor, not a hospital employee. If I sue the city because a pothole led to that accident, the defense attorney may be a staff attorney hired for a single case, not on the partner track at the firm.
Disposable workers include contractors, freelancers, and what I call marginal workers: people who are technically on a firm’s payroll but whom the firm has no intention of placing on any kind of career ladder and wouldn’t much care about losing.