Country of Exiles (29 page)

22.
The chicken and meatpacking businesses now produce at
unheard-of volumes for the world market, herding countless millions of animals and birds in pens for assembly-line slaughter and packaging; no work has become more ugly or demeaning, which explains why these companies have resorted so completely to immigrant labor (much of it illegal). On the demeaning side of it, see Tony Horwitz for his account of “blues on the chicken line,” in “9 to Nowhere,”
WSJ
, December 1, 1994, 1. The poultry-processing industry, he writes, “[has been] the second fastest growing factory job in America since 1980,” and it “has consigned a large class of workers to a Dickensian time warp, laboring not just for meager wages but also under dehumanized and often dangerous conditions.” In late 1998, conditions were unchanged; see Laurie P. Cohen, “With Help from INS, U.S. Meatpacker Taps Mexican Work Force,”
WSJ
, October 15, 1998, A1, A8.

The literature on every facet of these new brigades is enormous, and countless articles on the “return of sweatshops” have been written in this decade, but see Peter Kwong,
The New Chinatown
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); “Despite Tough Laws, Sweatshops Flourish,”
NYT
, February 6, 1995, 1; William Branigin, “Sweatshops Are Back,”
Washington Post National Weekly Edition
, February 24, 1997, 6–7; “Government Links Retailers to Sweatshops,”
WSJ
, December 15, 1997, B5A; “Garment Shops Found to Break Wage Laws,”
NYT
, October 17, 1997, B1–3; and Roy Beck,
The Case Against Immigration
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).

23.
Quoted in Alexander Keyssar,
Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 62.

24.
Keyssar,
Out of Work
, pp. 74–75, 89–90. See also Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “International Migration, 1850–1939: An Economic Survey,” in Hatton and Williamson, eds.,
Migration and the International Labor Market, 1850–1939
(New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 17, 20, 23.

25.
They were also “structured” in different ways—numbering “men and women who were idle during slow seasons, employees who worked on short time, floaters who migrated from one place to another, casuals, and substitute spinners and printers who were
called up only when regular workers were absent or when the demand for labor was unusually great”
(ibid.
, p. 7).

26.
The literature on temps has grown over the years, but see Kevin D. Henson,
Just a Temp
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Robert E. Parker,
Flesh Peddlers and Warm Bodies: The Temporary Help Industry and Its Workers
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

27.
Lawrence Mishel et al.,
The State of Working America 1998–99
, pp. 8, 46–7, 242–52.

28.
See “A Semi-Tough Policy on Illegal Workers,”
Washington Post
, July 13, 1998, 22. And for increased figures, see “A Temporary Force to Be Reckoned With,”
NYT
, May 20, 1996, D1; “Temp Firms Expected to Post Gains,” October 14, 1996, B8; and Parker,
Flesh Peddlers
, p. 30.

29.
Parker,
Flesh Peddlers
, p. 30.

30.
“Temporary-Help Industry Now Features Battle of Giants,”
WSJ
, November 6, 1997, B4.

31.
“Big Companies Hire More Lawyer Temps,”
WSJ
, September 23, 1994, B1; “The Newest Temps in Law Firms: Lawyers,”
NYT
, February 24, 1998, B7; and, on biologists, chemists, and accountants, see “These Temps Don’t Type But They’re Handy in the Lab,”
BusinessWeek
, May 24, 1993, 68; “Brains for Rent,”
Forbes
, July 13, 1995, 99–100; and “Temp Tycoon Steers Jobseekers,”
WSJ
, October 4, 1994, A19. On earlier use of temps, see Bennet Harrison,
Lean and Mean
(New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 201–9; and Richard Barnett,
Global Dreams
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 340.

32.
Helene Cooper and Thomas Kamm, “Much of Europe Eases Its Rigid Labor Laws, and Temps Proliferate,”
WSJ
, June 5, 1998, A1.

33.
Among the corporations to draw on these foreign reserves were the fashion industry, which recruited well over 7,000 fashion models from around the world between 1990 and 1994, including the Italian male model Fabio, a definite rarity who recently obtained his green card under the H-1B program. Big accounting firms and related businesses reaped their bounty, too, for a total of 12,500 H-1B accountants and auditors; industrial and pharmaceuticals
firms boasted a total of 14,000 foreign temps for the same period. Figures from “H-1B Progam—Survey Data—1992–1994—U.S. Department of Labor. On Fabio, see
WSJ
, September 3, 1996, 1.

34.
For these features of the law, see the report of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, “Workforce Improvement and Protection Act of 1998,” 105–657, which accompanied H.R. 3736, July 29, 1998, pp. 10–11, 22.

35.
“Forget the Huddled Masses: Send Nerds,”
BusinessWeek
, July 21, 1997, 110–16.

36.
Phone interview with Labor Ready staff, April 17, 1998;
Labor Ready Annual Report 1996
, courtesy Labor Ready, Tacoma, Washington, pp. 8–9;
Wall Street Corporate Reporter
, June 23–29, 1997, 1 (courtesy Labor Ready); and
New Tribune
(internet journal), February 23, 1997, 1 (courtesy Labor Ready).

37.
Quoted in
Wall Street Corporate Reporter
, June 23–29, 1997, 1.

38.
Phone interview with Labor Ready staff, April 15, 1998; “Company Provides Temporary Jobs to Blue-collar Workers,”
Putnam Reporter Dispatch
, March 28, 1998, 5B; “Temp Firm Earns Niche in Manual Labor,”
Chicago Tribune
, March 13, 1998; Charles Keenan, “Temp Agency Uses Diebold to Pay Daily in Cash,”
American Banker
, March 3, 1998; and Julie Tamaki, “Hardware Chain Adds a Depot for Hiring Laborers,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 11, 1997.

39.
“Temp Tycoon Steers Jobseekers,”
WSJ
, October 4, 1994, A19.

40.
On high-tech “permatemps,” see
NYT
, March 30, 1998, B1; and Mitchell Fromstein (CEO of Manpower), quoted in
Business Week
, June 10, 1996, 8. By the mid-nineties, moreover, upwards of 230 smaller temp firms had been created (well above the figure of forty in 1990) to serve these specialized markets, and sometimes making multimillion-dollar profits. See “A Temporary Force to Be Reckoned With,”
NYT
, May 20, 1996, D1. On Silicon Valley as prototype for other workplaces, see “Full Time, Part Time, Temp—All See the Job in a Different Light,”
WSJ
, March 18, 1997, A1, A10; and, for a subsequent development, see “Coopers and Lybrand Tackles Turnover By Letting Its Workers Have a Life,”
WSJ
, September 19, 1997, R4: “About 900 of the [this] firm’s 17,000 US employees … now work part time,
telecommute, or have other flexible schedules. Almost none did so six years ago.”

41.
Figures from “H-1B Program—Survey Data—1992–94” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor); and “A U.S. Recruiter Goes Far Afield to Bring in High-Tech Workers,”
WSJ
, January 8, 1998, 1.

42.
Even
BusinessWeek
found serious fault with this position. See “Is There a Technie Shortage?,”
BusinessWeek
, June 29, 1998.

43.
Testimony before the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, “Employment-Based Immigration Consultation,” Washington, D.C., February 23, 1995, pp. 11–20; also January 18, 1995, p. 57 (for Motorola), and p. 66 (for 3M).

44.
These corporate quotes come from Charles Keely, “Globalization and Human Resource Management: Nonimmigrant Visa Strategies and Behavior of U.S. Firms,” 53. This report, heavily biased in favor of globalized firms, quotes abundantly from the firms themselves; it makes clear that they want, above all, “labor flexibility,” which foreigners (not Americans) give them. “The problem would seem to be [for Americans] willingness to relocate and perhaps move into a new work environment.” Keely is professor of international migration at Georgetown University.

45.
See Keely, “Globalization and Human Resource Management,” which speaks for seven major global firms but also pretends to represent the views of the majority of such firms. Among Keely’s other listed companies are Deloitte and Touche, Ford, Procter and Gamble, and Eastman Chemical. All quotes in this discussion, once again, come from this seventy-five-page report.

46.
Ibid.
, p. 63.

47.
The report of the House Committee on the Judiciary, “Workforce Improvement and Protection Act of 1998,” pp. 10–11, 17–22. See also
Chronicle of Higher Education
, August 7, 1998, May 29, 1998, A33; “High-Tech Companies to Ask Congress for Easier Immigration for Workers,”
WSJ
, February 24, 1998, A2; and
NYT
, October 16, 1998, p. A25.

48.
Richard Chait, “Thawing the Cold War over Tenure,”
Adjunct Advocate
, January–February 1998, 18; and Anne Matthews,
Bright College Years: Inside the Campus Today
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), pp 177–91.

49. Some analysts put the figure even higher, at more than 50 percent (a figure that includes part-timers, temporary full-timers, and teaching and research assistants). If one included graduate assistants, the figure was possibly this high (phone interview with Ernest Benjamin, director of research, American Association of University Professors, July 21, 1998). See “For Some Adjunct Faculty Members, the Tenure Track Holds Little Appeal,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, July 24, 1998, A9; “Contracts Replace the Tenure Track for a Growing Number of Professors,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, June 12, 1998, A12; “Professors Are Working Part Time, and More Teach at 2-Year Colleges,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, March 13, 1998, A14. See also, for changes over time, Tony Horowitz, “Young Professors Find Life in Academia Isn’t What It Used to Be,”
WSJ
, February 15, 1994, 1; Seth Adams, “Part-Time College Teaching Rises,”
NYT
, January 1, 1995, A17; Philip Altbach, “The Pros and Cons of Hiring ‘Taxi-cab’ Professors,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, January 6, 1995, B3; and Mary Elizabeth Perry, “The Invisible Majority: Myths, Realities, and a Call to Action,”
Perspectives
(American Historical Association newsletter), May–June 1995, 33:5, 9–11; and P. D. Lesko, interview with Kali Tal,
Adjunct Advocate
(Nov./Dec. 1997), 17. On wage disparities, see P. D. Lesko, “What Scholarly Associations Should Do to Stop the Exploitation of Adjuncts,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, December 15, 1995, B3.

50.
On the number of post-docs, see
Chronicle of Higher Education
, August 7, 1998, A60, and David North,
Soothing the Establishment
(New York: University Press of America, 1995), p. 98.

51.
On community colleges, see Patricia M. Callan, “America’s Public Community Colleges,”
Daedalus
(Fall 1997) 126:4, 98.

52.
Quoted in Judith Gappa and David W. Leslie,
The Invisible Faculty: Improving the Status of Part-timers in Higher Education
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993), pp. 133. On recent attempts to organize on behalf of better conditions for adjuncts and temporaries, see, “Faculty Unions Move to Organize Growing Ranks of Part-Time Professors,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, February 27, 1998, A12–13.

53.
Clark Kerr,
The Uses of the University
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963, 1982), p. 95.

54. The term “urban glamour zone” belongs to Saskia Sassen, who, more than any current urbanist, has stressed the formation of these two groups (the new immigrants and the new international elite) as they relate to one another. See her
Globalization and Its Discontents
(New York: The New Press, 1998), especially pp. xix–xxxvi. There is a huge literature on the informal economy, but on its spread and significance recently, in New York, see Louis Winnick,
New People in Old Neighborhoods
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), pp. 123–71; and Peter Kwong,
The New Chinatown
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1997, rev. ed.), esp. chap. 10, “Unwelcome Newcomers: Chinatown in the 1990s,” pp. 174–205; and Roger Sanjek,
The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), especially chapter 6, pp. 119–40.

55.
New York Post
, March 6, 1995, 2. In 1992, moreover, Governor Mario Cuomo’s office published a handbook for immigrants, titled
Getting Started
, which includes an introduction by the governor (New York State, Office of the Governor, 1992). The handbook explained to “undocumented aliens” how they might get access to public housing, to schools and higher education, and to jobs; and it provided extensive information on how to protest discrimination.

On decriminalizing the informal economy, see the 1994 testimony on New York City’s labor markets before the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform by Emmanuel Tobier, professor at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at NYU and a prominent city government adviser; Tobier told the commission that because “the workplace [is] changing tremendously,” “you really have to decriminalize the underground economy” (November 3, 1994, typescript, p. 114). Another important shaper of New York City’s policy has been the Regional Planning Association, which advised, in its third regional plan, that New York City “legalize activities that do not threaten health and safety; such as small, home-based businesses in areas zoned for residential use”; see Tony Hiss,
Region at Risk
(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996), p. 192.