Читать книгу How to Find Work in the 21st Century - Ron McGowan - Страница 12

The twentieth century was the century of mass production and large corporations, and the workplace was dominated by industrial giants like General Motors. At the end of the century, the biggest employer in the United States was Manpower, a company that specializes in temporary and contingent workers.

In the manufacturing sector, one of the improvements that companies have made to make their process more efficient and economical is to employ a just-in-time approach to the inventory of parts that they carry. Instead of having large quantities of these parts sitting in inventory for long periods before they get used up, they access those parts from their suppliers at the time that they are needed in the manufacturing process and have thus eliminated the need for costly inventories.

The same type of thing is happening in the workplace as companies increasingly view the work to be done in terms of projects and think of their staffing needs in terms of what they need for current and upcoming projects. The idea of a temp, or temporary worker has been around for decades, but it tended to be restricted to clerical and office staff like receptionists and data entry clerks. Now companies hire temporary workers at all levels within the organization.

This is particularly true in the Information Technology or IT sector. That industry is very project oriented, and IT companies regularly hire people for projects with no expectation that their employment will become long-term. Even in Japan, the last bastion of the idea of lifetime employment, many companies where employees have traditionally expected to spend their entire careers with that company are now moving towards hiring temporary workers.

A January 3, 2008, article in The Economist titled “Sayonara, Salaryman” points out that almost 40 percent of the workforce in Japan are part-time, contingent, and contract workers and that this category is growing while permanent jobs are decreasing. It also points out that today’s young workers are not interested in accepting the corporate paternalism of their parents’ generation, where work was the center of their lives and even led in some cases to “karoshi” or “death by overwork.”