Temp by Louis Hyman

Author:Louis Hyman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

The Failure to Regulate

From the start, Cassedy and Nussbaum had envisioned creating an “independent women office workers’ organization.”58 First they had gathered facts and built a network. But they still faced serious challenges. Unions were on the decline. In the early 1970s, unions represented only about a quarter of all workers—and those were mostly men. “Labor bureaucracy,” they wrote, “consists of a few men negotiating with corporations and government—not a democratic system; may not represent interests of rank and file,” especially when that rank and file were women.59 The women’s movement had “increased women’s consciousness of their oppression,” but it had not yet created “organizational forms” to counter that oppression.60

The plan was straightforward. The organization would help office workers, like those at the Boston insurance company Liberty Mutual, to organize themselves. Starting with a group of “dissatisfied” women, with 9to5’s support, they would make contact with a union and begin an organization drive. When the union won, 9to5 would “get our contacts elected to the negotiating committee” and make sure that the women workers, not the “union reps or management,” were in charge. In this way, 9to5 would push for women’s voices within the labor movement.61 Nussbaum and Cassedy wanted to tap into women’s rage, their “taste of blood,” as well as achieve “more money and benefits.”

Temps would not, however, work with this plan. To unionize required work conditions like those at large insurance companies, where “clerical work is often performed in large offices [where] concentration of labor makes organizing easier and its effects more significant.”62 Organizing temps in a traditional local seemed impossible as well. As one temp wrote to 9to5, “I’ve thought about it some & I don’t see anyway you could organize temps—wouldn’t they just shit list us? & I need the work to live.” Temps didn’t have the workplace rights that other office workers had and were, by definition, replaceable. Although 9to5 wanted to organize temp workers alongside other office workers, the realities for temps were different. The biggest challenge was that one agency’s temps were distributed over many different workplaces. Labor solidarity comes from group solidarity.

Temps, as 9to5 organizer Janet Selcer noted, found it “hard to meet one another; we often have a feeling of isolation, and thus powerlessness.”63 Temps had only the loosest connections to a particular agency and no connections to one another. Selcer was nonetheless optimistic, inspired by the recent farmworker victories: “If the rural migrants can do it, so can we.” Overcoming that isolation through “unity and collective identity” would prove even harder than Selcer imagined.

Ana remembered when she was eighteen and worked for a summer after her freshman year at college, “back [when] jobs were plentiful and rents were cheap.” She and her roommate were both temps. She was hired through Olsten to “tear carbon papers from bills of lading and stuff envelopes seven hours a day” at the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation on Fifty-seventh Street in New York. In the summer heat, she wore a skirt, blouse, and nylons

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