The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It

"The Fissured Workplace was fundamental to my thinking, especially about one of these factors that I mentioned earlier, that drives pay and helps us understand changing pay dynamics over the last couple of decades—equity norms. This book takes us through ways in which corporations have outsourced, and otherwise shed functions—and the workers involved—that used to be in-house. At my university, outside my window, you will see security guards working and grounds crew tending to the plants. There’s a staffed cafeteria next door. Thirty years ago, all those workers were employed by my university, and received a paycheck from the university. Many have been outsourced to staffing companies. And what Weil does in his book is take us through what that allows the lead firm—in this case, the university—to do in terms of pay. It’s really hard to justify drastic pay differentials under the same roof. It’s harder to, say, pay your professors X amount, and your grounds crew and your cafeteria staff much, much less if they’re all employed by the same organization. And so a solution to that, if you’re trying to cut labor costs, which is a dominant trend across all industries, is simply to say, ‘Those people are no longer employees. And we’ll contract with staffing companies that can supply them and take the lowest bid.’ There’s a lot more in this book, but it is a fundamental text for understanding how, over time, companies were able to skirt around equity concerns that in the past helped constrain wages. Yes, exactly. And so another fundamental insight is the rise of the ‘temp’ workforce. Oftentimes, it’s ‘temp’ in name only. There are classic examples now in US manufacturing plants where you’re brought in by a temp agency, you’re working at, say, a Nissan plant or a Honda facility and you’re working alongside Honda workers and Nissan workers, you’re doing the same work that they are doing, but you are not being paid by Honda or Nissan. You’re being paid by your temporary agency. And you can oftentimes find yourself toiling away at that temp agency for a year, two years, three years, making far less than your colleagues sitting one row over on the assembly line, who actually are classified differently from you. Absolutely, because they are going to be much less likely to try to bid up their wages, to bargain, when they see what the alternative might be."