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The temping of America has its downsides. You've all heard about them: lack of job security, diminished or nonexistent benefits, and reinforcement of the message that workers are all identical, replaceable cogs in a vast corporate machine.
But you may not have thought about the upside.
I don't mean for a moment to trivialize the fact that millions of workers have no health insurance, live paycheck-to-paycheck, and feel that they need to submit to abuse on the job in order to pay the rent and put food on the table.
But being seen as replaceable has a strong positive corollary: We don't have to wait for bosses to replace us. Feeling like a second-class citizen? If the bosses at your job don't appreciate you, hey, you can
leave. Employees can become comparison shoppers, with a healthy dose of self-esteem and a supply of good-quality résumé paper.
This doesn't only apply to jobs defined as "temporary," or to employees labeled as "temporary workers." More and more jobs are seen as temporary, whether they're called permanent or not, and not just by the bosses.
It's less and less frowned upon to have a string of short-term jobs behind you. People used to have to work for ten or twenty years at a company to build up a reputation (and a pension). Now that employer loyalty is a thing of the past, why should employee loyalty stick around?
After all, shouldn't we work to live, not live to work? That doesn't mean jobs can't or shouldn't be enjoyable. Ideally, companies would value workers as human beings, and workers would reward this treatment with productivity and expertise. However, the last time I checked, Utopia was still on the distant horizon, and many employees are still being treated like chopped liver.
In the end, the cosmic joke may be on the employers, because human beings are not interchangeable cogs. Employee morale does matter. Empowerment is not about whiny workers complaining about getting their feelings hurt; it's about taking pride in a job well done and rightfully resenting the fact that one's contributions are not valued.
If employees really felt valued, why would large corporations be shelling out millions of dollars on huge human resources departments? HR is now one of the most lucrative fields in which to work. It does seem karmic that you can now make quite a bit of money from corporations that don't know how to retain their employees and must send the Hiring and Firing Squad out to find new ones.
It's easy to put a spin on "lack of job security." It's called "freedom."
Wendy Cholbi is a writer who lives with her husband, a philosopher, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Don't even try to tie her down.
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