New Books In Economics

It has become a truism that work has become less secure and more precarious for a widening swath of American workers. Why and how this has happened, and what workers can and should do about it, is the subject of a wide-ranging new book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream became Temporary (Viking, 2018). In Temp, Louis Hyman, Professor of History at the Industrial and Labor Relations School of Cornell University, presents a detailed history of the unraveling of steady work. Hyman acknowledges that secure, lucrative, meaningful work has never been equally available to all Americans, even amidst the prosperity of the post-WWII era. He also argues compellingly that the shift toward privileging shareholders over employees and short-term profit over long-term prosperity was not inevitable, nor is it irreversible. Jobs are less secure today not because the market demanded it but because, starting as early as the 1950s, executives, consultants, and policy makers decided to make them th