Temple University Press
The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America
Key Metrics
- Erin Hatton
- Temple University Press
- Hardcover
- 9781439900802
- 8.3 X 5.6 X 0.7 inches
- 0.8 pounds
- History > United States - 20th Century
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Everyone knows that work in America is not what it used to be. Layoffs, outsourcing, contingent work, disappearing career laddersOCothese are the new workplace realities for an increasing number of people. But why? InaThe Temp Economy, Erin Hatton takes one of the best-known icons of the new economyOCothe temp industryOCoand finds that it is more than just a symbol of this degradation of work. The temp industry itself played an active role in this declineOCoand not just for temps. Industry leaders started by inventing the Kelly Girl, exploiting 1950s gender stereotypes to justify low wages, minimal benefits, and chronic job insecurity. But they did not stop with Kelly Girls. From selling humanbusiness machines in the 1970s to permatemps in the 1990s, the temp industry relentlessly portrayed workers as profit-busting liabilities that hurt companies' bottom lines even in boom times. These campaigns not only legitimized the widespread use of temps, they also laid the cultural groundwork for a new corporate ethos of ruthless cost cutting and mass layoffs.
Succinct, highly readable, and drawn from a vast historical record of industry documents, aThe Temp Economyais a one-stop resource for anyone interested in the temp industry or the degradation of work in postwar America.
Author Bio
Erin Hatton, PhD, is an associate professor in the UB Department of Sociolgoy. Prof. Hatton’s research focuses on work and political economy, while also extending into the fields of social inequality, labor, law and social policy.
Her first book, The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America (Temple University Press, 2011), weaves together gender, race, class and work in a cultural analysis of the temporary help industry and rise of the new economy. Prof. Hatton’s new book, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment (UC Press, 2020), analyzes four very different--and unusual--groups of workers: incarcerated, workfare, college athlete, and graduate student workers.
Drawing on more than 120 in-depth interviews across these four groups, in this book she uncovers a new form of labor coercion and analyzes its consequences for workers in America.
Education
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007
MS, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003
BA, Kenyon College, 1996
Source: The State University of New York - Buffalo
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