Every day, many of us eat at restaurants, stay at hotels, receive packages, and use our digital devices with the assumption that the company we pay for these services — Hilton, Amazon, Apple, etc. — also employs the people who deliver them. This assumption is increasingly incorrect: Our deliveries are often made by contractors and our hotel rooms are cleaned by temporary employees from staffing agencies.
How to Make Employment Fair in an Age of Contracting and Temp Work
A former leader in the Department of Labor on our fissured workplace.
March 24, 2017
Summary.
In order to focus on core competencies, companies have been shedding “ancillary” jobs for decades while increasingly relying on contractors to do the same work — think payroll, publications, accounting, and human resources. This has created what David Weil, President Obama’s head of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, calls a “fissured workplace,” and it’s led to formidable cracks on which today’s economy rests — and on the lives of workers who find themselves without fair pay or a career ladder. While we can’t roll back economic history, executives and policymakers can work together to make work better for employees while keeping companies competitive.