Country of Exiles by William R. Leach Read Free Book Online Page B

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 pharmaceuticalsfirms 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