Paul Osterman, "Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Paul Osterman, "Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment"

Date: July 5, 2026
Host: Dr. Zachary Williams
Guest: Dr. Paul Osterman, Professor Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management

Episode Overview

This episode features Dr. Paul Osterman discussing his latest book, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment (Harvard University Press, 2026). The conversation explores the evolution of employment in the United States, focusing on the shift from stable, career-oriented jobs to contingent, precarious, and "disposable" employment relationships. Osterman synthesizes decades of labor research to explain how and why this transformation has occurred, its effects on workers and families, and the challenges and potential policy solutions facing American society today.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Core Theme: The Employer-Employee "Divorce"

• Book’s Key Premise: The book analyzes the “divorce” between employers and employees, in which firms still need people to perform work but increasingly avoid treating them as “regular employees” with benefits and protections ([03:12]).
  • Quote: “This is a book about divorce. It’s about the divorce between employers and employees. …firms need people to do the work, they need bodies to do the work, but they don’t want to treat them as regular employees…” — Paul Osterman [03:12]

2. Historical Context: Decline of the Post-War Employment Compact

• Post-WWII Consensus: After WWII, unions and government intervention created relatively stable, career-based jobs with internal labor markets, benefits, and norms of fairness.

• However, this system was never universal; women, people of color, and agricultural workers were often left out ([05:47]).

  • Quote: “At the core, what was created was a career system for most people… what we call internal labor markets. …There was a system that was stable. …If you look at the creation of the American middle class, it was very successful in this period. So that got blown up.” — Paul Osterman [05:47]

• Erosion Factors: International trade, financialization, Wall Street pressures, and a less union-friendly government contributed to the collapse of this compact. Osterman notes, “the government became less friendly to unions…the ability to enforce regulatory protections eroded” ([05:47]).

3. The New Employment System and "Disposable Workers"

• Who Are ‘Disposable Workers’?: Osterman defines three categories:

  1. Contractors: Employees of staffing agencies, not the client firms; often low-paid, precarious (building cleaners, security guards, etc.).
  2. Marginal Workers: On payroll, but with no career paths or advancement (adjunct faculty, staff attorneys, part-time workers).
  3. Freelancers: Independent workers who usually trade pay for flexibility ([12:06], [16:33]).
  • Quote: “Contractors…for many, it’s a bad job…building cleaners…paid low wages…jobs usually not full time…short-term contracts…pressure on wages.” — Paul Osterman [12:06]
  • Quote: “Marginal workers…employed by a firm internally, but have no career opportunities. …They are much less satisfied.” — Paul Osterman [12:06]

• Empirical Basis: The book includes a national survey of ~6,000 workers about work systems, preferences, satisfaction, and arrangements.

• Main Findings:

  • 35% of American workforce now fit the ‘disposable’ category—either as contractors, freelancers, or marginal workers ([32:15]).
  • Disposable workers have lower pay, less satisfaction, and little organizational loyalty.
  • Such jobs particularly impact people of color and those with less educational attainment ([28:42], [32:15]).

4. Structural and Ideological Changes

• Shrinking Core of Stable Employment: Internal promotion and job security remain only for a diminishing fraction of workers; wage setting is now more market-driven, and firms are more likely to hire externally ([10:04]).
• Cost & Respect: Osterman argues firms pursue disposability for cost savings and greater managerial discretion, but also due to a lack of respect or perceived necessity for frontline workers ([20:27]).
  • Quote: “McKinsey says…95% of the value of a firm is generated by only 5% of its employees. ...That means that other employees…don’t deserve respect or good treatment.” — Paul Osterman [20:27]

5. Impacts on Workers and Families

• Work-Life Balance: The unpredictable hours, income instability, and lack of benefits in disposable work are disruptive to family life and well-being ([20:27], [25:57]).
• Psychological Toll: Increased job anxiety, diminished perceptions of meritocracy, and growing disillusionment with the American social contract ([20:27]).
• Disproportionate Burden: Disposable work disproportionately affects people of color and those with lower education ([28:42], [32:15]).

6. Economic and Political Implications

• Inequality: While “on average people are better off than 30 years ago,” gains are uneven and income inequality has sharply widened ([32:15]).
• Political Anger: Economic insecurity has fueled public anger and distrust towards political establishments, with both major parties contributing to a lack of progress on worker protections ([28:42]).
  • Quote: “A big source of what’s going on …is anger…people who feel they’ve been left out by the economy and are just striking out at the establishment.” — Paul Osterman [28:42]

7. Policy Responses and the Role of Worker Organizations

• Legal Complexity: Federal labor law contains inconsistent definitions of “employee,” complicating comprehensive reform. Progress hinges on fluctuating political and judicial interpretations ([37:17]).
• State and Local Initiatives: Some states have broadened definitions of employee for worker protections, but federal change remains elusive ([37:17]).
• Worker Centers: While promising as grassroots, non-union advocacy, worker centers struggle to scale and are heavily dependent on voluntary dues, often serving primarily immigrant populations ([42:38]).
  • Potential Alliances: Partnering with religious and civic organizations (e.g., Industrial Areas Foundation) can yield effective, if small-scale, community organizing ([44:12]).

8. Universal Health Insurance as a Labor Issue

• Link to Disposability: The structure of employer-sponsored health insurance incentivizes firms to avoid standard employment relationships. Universal health care could reduce the incentive for disposability ([47:40]).
  • Quote: “A national health insurance…would eliminate that incentive for disposability and might very well diminish…percentage of people who are treated as disposable workers.” — Paul Osterman [47:40]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Main Argument

  • “This is a book about divorce. It’s about the divorce between employers and employees.” — Osterman [03:12]

• On Employment Trends

  • “The world has also changed for [standard workers]… wage setting has become much more market driven… promotions are more difficult” — Osterman [10:04]

• On the Survey Findings

  • “For most contractors, they’re more dissatisfied than standard workers, they’re paid substantially less, and they have much less commitment to the success of the enterprise…” — Osterman [12:06]

• Scale of Problem

  • “The real headline in the book is that 35% …of the American workforce falls into my disposable worker category…” — Osterman [32:15]

• On Management’s Valuation of Workers

  • “McKinsey says …95% of the value of a firm is generated by only 5% of its employees. …That’s the attitude of management a lot of the times towards employees.” — Osterman [20:27]

• On Policy and Capitalism Metaphor

  • “Firms are good for us… but they have only one objective… to maximize profits. So just like with sharks, we need to create barriers…” — Osterman [37:17]

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Important Timestamps

• [03:12] – Book’s main concept: the “divorce” between employers and employees.
• [05:47] – Historical context: from postwar stability to the current landscape.
• [10:04] – The new employment system and shrinking "core" internal labor market.
• [12:06] – Who are disposable workers? Key survey findings.
• [20:27] – Structural forces, company motives, and lack of respect for frontline employees.
• [25:57] – Effects on families and diminishing unionization/worker leverage.
• [28:42] – Political implications; blame across political spectrum.
• [32:15] – Scale and demographic breakdown of the disposable workforce.
• [37:17] – Policy complexities and the “shark” analogy for firms.
• [42:38] – Viability and limits of worker centers; scaling labor advocacy.
• [44:12] – Role of alliances with civic/religious institutions.
• [47:40] – The relationship between health insurance, disposability, and public health.
• [50:59] – Key takeaways and call for nuanced, multi-level policy approaches.

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Closing: Key Takeaways from Osterman

1. Disposable Employment Is Now a Major Feature: 35% of the workforce is classified as disposable—contractors, freelancers, or marginal (careerless) workers.
2. Unequal Burdens: These precarious jobs disproportionately affect people of color and those with less education.
3. Negative Outcomes: Lower pay, less job satisfaction, greater instability, and reduced commitment to work among disposable workers.
4. Policy Complexity: Federal law, variable state approaches, and judicial interpretations make comprehensive reform difficult. Innovation is often local/state-level.
5. Need for Stronger Barriers: The capitalist profit motive isn’t inherently problematic, but requires robust regulatory “barriers” to protect workers.
6. Potential for Change: Some state and local wins, community organizing, and healthcare reform could help, but the challenge of retrenching workplace justice remains formidable.

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Final Thoughts and Forward Look

Dr. Osterman closes by expressing his ongoing commitment to researching fairness and equity at work, emphasizing both the urgency and complexity of addressing the challenges facing American workers today ([52:44]).

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For listeners interested in understanding how the nature of work has changed—and what that means for economic justice, families, and democracy—this episode offers clear-eyed analysis, empirical evidence, and a sobering call to action rooted in decades of scholarship and real-world observation.

Transcript

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[Dr. Paul Osterman]

welcome to the New Books Network

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

Good Morning. Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Dr. Zachary Williams and today we have the honor and the privilege of having Dr. Paul Osterman Professor Emeritus of Human Resources and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as member of the Department of urban planning at MIT. From July 2003 to June 2007, Dr. Osterman served as Deputy Dean at the MIT Sloan School. His research focuses on changes in work organization within companies, career patterns and processes within firms, economic development, urban poverty, and policy surrounding skills training and employment programs. Dr. Osterman has been a Senior Administrator of Job training programs for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and has consulted widely for government agencies, foundations, community groups, firms, and public interest organizations. Prior to his most recent book, which we'll talk about just a Second, his other works include who Will Care for Us Long Term Care in the Long Term Workforce from Russell Sage in 2017 Good Jobs America Making Work Better for Everyone, also from Russell Sage in 2011 gathering the future of Progressive Politics in America from Beacon Press in 20202003 and the American Securing Prosperity the American Labor Market How It Has Changed and what to Do about it from Princeton University Press and Today, the book that we're here to Talk about, Disposable Workers the Transformation of Employment from Harvard University Press. Dr. Oskar it's our honor and privilege to have you join us today. And let's get into it and talk about it as we talk about, you know, your title and the concept and thought behind it, Disposable Workers. And how does it relate to the broad range of your scholarship and how, how do you situate it in our sort of economic and, and, you know, financial times in which we live in today? Sure.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Well, I have to the kind of the opening line of the book is this is a book about divorce. It's about the divorce between employers and employees. And kind of the basic idea here is that firms need people to do the work, they need bodies to do the work, but they don't want to treat them as regular employees with all the kind of protections and status that comes with that. And so the book is about how much of that is happening, why it's happening and what to do about it. And I'm sure we'll talk about all those points. In terms of my larger research, I've always worked on how employment is changing with a focus on the impact of changes in employment systems on people's economic well being and welfare. So really all my work has been about some version of economic justice or economic fairness or things along those lines. And so as you mentioned, the book on long term care was about the long term care workforce, which is a high, very low paid workforce. And the book talks about why that is and how to make it better. Good Jobs America is really about how you can what kind of policies are available broadly for kind of raising the floor in the labor market. So that's what I've always worked on. And this book is a continuation of that.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

And thank you so much for sharing that. And as I was researching your work and also reading through your book, there's a lot of interesting interrelationships and subjects that you explore. Among them the intersection of economic sociology and workforce policy. And there are a number of other conversations we can get into as it relates to this whole notion of work life, family balance, and how that's changed over, over the course of a century, the American century, some say. But you also talk about the disintegration of the employment system Since World War II and the Post World War II Compact that featured stability, benefits, internal promotion, and an sort of implicit or implied lifetime attachment between workers and employers, and how that shifts to this institutional reshaping of a system that is more based on contingency, disposability and austerity and security. Can you talk about how your work explored that Subject and how, what it means for American workers in the 20th and 21st century.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Sure. So after the war, World War II, a combination of government action and unionization. Now you have to remember that back then unions accounted for about 30% of the workforce, private sector workforce. And the non union firms imitated union patterns to avoid being unionized. And the government played a big role too. And so not for everybody. It's important to understand that. So people of color in the south were excluded. Agricultural workers were excluded. Women tended to be in jobs that were problematic in some respects, many respects. But at the core, what was created was a career system for most people. It didn't involve lifetime security, but it involved promotion ladders, what we call internal labor markets. It involved a set of rules and procedures that took on an essentially normative value. And when norms get created, they tend to be enforced by the group. And so there was a system that was stable. And if you look at the creation of the American middle class, it was very successful in this period. So that got blown up. And it got blown up by a lot of things, including international trade, financialization, the pressure that Wall street put on firms, but also the change in the politics. So the government became much less friendly to unions. The ability to kind of enforce regulatory protections eroded. And so all this came together to kind of blow up the post war system. Now what this book is about, the new book Disposable Workers is about a specific development that goes beyond the kind of big picture that I just described, which is not only the firms not want to provide careers for people in the same sense that they used to. They don't really want employees, they want, they want contractors, they want freelancers, they want what I call marginal workers, which is a group we should talk about who are high turnover, not really part of the firm. And so they're not employees. And that's what's happening now.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

And when you speak of the structural mechanisms of the labor market transformation in chapter one, you speak to this new employment system that emerges where there are sort of both implicit and explicit bargains that are being made with the sort of characteristics like worker loyalty and job security, predictable wages, employer providing health insurance, defined benefits and pensions, and sort of these, this expectation on behalf of workers of advancement within a system where, you know, where, you know, they are sort of defined, you know, expectations and the like. And it begins to shift from that. And, but, but how, you know, that system, you know, features, you know, three pillars which have become sort of common sort of place language in the sort of, the Economic rhetoric of, of the country as it relates to, you know, of course, the labor markets and the free market system and you know, systems based on seniority. But as you're talking about with regard to unions and how that shifted, you know, initially it's supposed to be given an institutional voice and collective bargaining, you know, participation and leverage. And your model speaks to the whole presence of the Keynesian macroeconomic policy that promotes supply and demand and better achievable aspirations for full employment. So how do we move from that to a system that becomes a direct opposite of that, to where that sort of hope and potential of achieving aspirational prosperity becomes a sort of a foregone conclusion and a system emerges that then has this rhetoric of the free market. And it's more based on incentivizing, but it doesn't necessarily give material benefits to workers.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Yeah, yeah. So I think two things are happening. First, there are some people who remain kind of inside the bosom of the firm. They're still treated like valuable employees. The point I'm making in the book is the perimeter is shrinking. The fraction of the workforce that looks like that is much less than it used to be. And the large portion of the people on the outside are these disposable workers that we'll talk about now. Even for the people inside the firm who are still treated as employees, the world has also changed for them. So as an example, wage setting has become much more market driven for them than it used to be. Promotions are more difficult because firms are increasingly willing to hire from the outside rather than just promote from within. So even for standard workers, things have become more problematic or complicated or more competitive or more insecure, whatever word you want to use. But then there's the people on the outside. And the people on the outside are these disposable workers. And for them they're really at risk, right? They're, they're freelancers. They don't know where their next, their next contract's coming from. Their contract worker is being shifted from one place to another. They're marginal workers who are people who are employed by the firm, but not in jobs that involve career ladders or security. And for them the world is just completely different than the post war model used to be.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

And with that, how can you, could you talk more about how this affects workers and even workers relationship to the workplace and even how it affects workers in their sort of relationship between the workplace and family life? And what does that have to say about the evolution or the disintegration of the social Contract as there's this rise in free market ideology and expression.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Well, again, for the people inside the firm who are still standard employees, the social contract has been rewritten in a way to their disadvantage. Right. So as I just said, their wages are set by the market now as opposed to by internal procedures and norms. That's just an example for people on the outside. They have no contract, social contract with the firm where they do the work. That's the whole point from the firm's point of view is it doesn't have responsibility for these folks. At some point we should talk about who these people are and what are the different versions of disposable work you ask about. What are the consequences for people? So I should step back and describe the kind of the empirical basis of the book. I did a lot of interviews with people and with employers, but the real core of the book is a national survey I did of about 6,000 workers. And that survey asked very detailed questions about their work systems, their work arrangements and their preferences and their wages and their degree of satisfaction and so on. And the comment I'm going to about to make about one of the consequences for these people is based on those surveys. What people are telling you me in that survey. Now it is complex. So take, take contractors. Contractors are people who work at the location of a, of a client, a firm, but aren't employees of that firm. They're employees of a staffing agency. Staffing agency could be manpower, it could be Kelly Services, or it could be a mom and pop staffing agency, all of that. Now for many contractors it's a bad job. So a classic example would be building cleaners. They work for staffing companies, they're paid low wages. The jobs are usually not full time. So people have to hold more than one of these jobs, the contracts. Their staffing agency has short term contracts with the building. So there's always pressure on wages because the building can play one contractor off against another. The same thing is true for other kinds of contractors. Security guards, landscapers. These are kind of all what you might call low end contractors. But there are examples of contractors through whom it's a great deal. Travel nurses is an example I use. So travel nurses are contractors, they work for a staffing agency. They move from one hospital to another, but they're paid very well and many people enter into it because they want to be able to choose where they want to live. They want to go to some nice place for six months and then go to another nice place for six months. So the book asks detailed questions about people's degree of satisfaction, wages, commitment to their workplace. For most contractors, they're more dissatisfied than standard workers, they're paid substantially less, and they have much less commitment to the success of the enterprise for whom they're working. That's also true of what I call marginal workers, which we should talk about. Those are folks who are employed by a Firm Internally, they're W2s for that firm, but they have no career opportunities in that firm. An example there adjunct faculty is an example. Staff attorneys is an example. Many part time workers are examples. These folks also get paid less than standard workers who have the same level of education and experience, and they're much less satisfied. Freelancers tend to be happier campers. Freelance people go into freelancing in large part because it gives them a lot of flexibility to hours. They can control how much they work. They get paid less, but they're willing to make that trade off. So their degree of satisfaction is fairly high. As I said, within each of these categories there's heterogeneity. Some people are happy, but on average, what I just described is true.

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[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

I think it's interesting when you mention about the presence of part time workers and how we move from this shift of the promises of full employment, the New Deal and thereafter the post World War II period. Carol Anderson talked about top period where we could have had sort of everything together in what could have pointed to a multiracial democracy, a full employment sector in society. And we go from that to what we see more of a regular current standard which you began to speak about. You know, the sort of part time worker, the gig economy con independent contractor and all the perils and problems of that in a country where you still have significant amount of wealth that's at the top. And so, you know, chapters I found it interesting when you talk about the forces behind the transformation that there's a sort of a confluence of forces that are not just in one area but it's sort of, you know, interrelated the structural, the ideological and the political. And thus what happens as it relates to the fallout and how it affects families is thus across various sectors as well. But based on those individuals we talked about, which we know all too well as relates to adjunct faculty and part time workers and contract workers and having to take on two jobs just to make ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck, vibrant, Eisenhreich being nickel and dimensional, how does that reflect how it's become a new norm in our society when there was such a so such promises in the post World War II era to where we come to a situation where there's income instability, the erosion of benefits and contingency becomes a regular reality. What you talked about. And what about the psychological effects of job anxiety? And again, how does that affect this whole question of work life, the myth of work life, family balance? Not just even that, but even this notion of meritocracy. Right.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

So just on work life balance, work life balance, the nature of some of these jobs, particularly part time work, low wage service work and contracting work, is it's very difficult to predict your hours. And if you can't predict your hours, if hours are unstable and unpredictable, that's very disruptive for workplace work life balance. And so that is another negative outcome of this development. If you think about why this is happening. When I say this, there's kind of two things going on here. One is the general erosion of the post war system that as I said earlier, is driven by big forces. It's driven by increased competitiveness in product markets, by trade, by financialization in which Wall street puts a lot of pressure on firms to squeeze the last dollar out. And also by changing political environment which permits firms to behave that way, makes it easier for them. The phenomenon in my book is affected by all that, but it's also in some sense more narrow. It's not just that firms treat employees worse in some respects is that they don't want employees in the first place. They want contractors, they want freelancers, they want people who like these marginal workers, what I call marginal workers who are high turnover and so firm doesn't have to worry about them and they create high turnover jobs. The book goes into some length, for example, on part time work. Now part time work in the census data. The census distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary part time work. Voluntary is you want to be a part timer, involuntary is you'd like a full time job but you can't find one. The vast majority of part time workers are classified as voluntary. That's over 80% are voluntary. So the simple conclusion from that is hey, part time work's not a problem. But the fact is that what's happened here is that firms have created part time jobs because part time jobs, voluntary and involuntary, are inherently higher turnover. And then it looks for people to take those part time jobs, right? It look goes and oftentimes those are women looking for part time work. But not only that. Now on the one hand you can say no problem, people are wanting part time work. But on the other hand it's if they're not using, they're not creating full time jobs for people who want full time work, they're using this part time route. So a perfect example of that is the recent labor strikes at UPS United Parcel Service, in which the company, UPS pushed for a larger fraction of its workforce being part time and the union pushed against it because they want full time good jobs. And even if the company created these part time jobs and people voluntarily took them, it's shrinking the number of real full time jobs out there. And so that's another phenomenon. The motivations for why companies are doing all this, obviously cost is one of them. So if you have an employee, you have a set of required benefits. If these people are contractors or freelancers or high turnover people working few hours, you don't have the same benefit burden. You have more managerial discretion. If you don't have employees, you can boss people around more easily, you can let them go, you can fire people more easily. And then the other phenomenon is basically lack of respect for frontline workers. So in the book, I quote a report from McKinsey, right? McKinsey is the nationally prominent, most famous management consulting firm. And in this report McKinsey says that its research shows that 95% of the value of a firm is generated by only 5% of its employees. So think what that means. That means that there's other employees, that other 95% are superfluous, they don't deserve respect or good treatment. And that's the attitude of management a lot of the times towards employees. And that's another source of the problem

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

and kind of with that. And as you talk about how there's this divergence of corporate strategies, but yet still workers are a centerpiece of the American labor system, the American economic system, American democracy in and of itself, economic democracy. So how has workers responses changed over time in response to that, part one and then part two? How has this affected, as you begin to talk about in chapter six, the American Family and the parallel between workforce life or life in American workspaces and the economic effects and social effects of the American family as both an economic and a social institution.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Well, on the family issue, as I said earlier, insecurity and unstable hours, which is part of the issue here, are disruptive to family life and stability. No question about that. In terms of how workers have responded, you do know that whereas in the post war period over 30% of the private sector workforce was unionized, now it's 6%. And so that's a real problem in terms of pushing back against this development. Part of that decline in unionization is due to employers fighting unions and public policy making it difficult to form unions. Labor law has not been reformed basically since the end of World War II. With Taft Hartley, which was a negative blow to the union movement there. Right there. There are examples of gig workers in New York, in California, organizing not to form unions, but to put pressure on the cities and state governments to enact employment standards. And in some cases, that's been successful. Massachusetts is another example of that. But the problem is that tends to be a coastal phenomenon. You know, the East Coast, west coast, the vast middle of the country, in the south, that's not happening. In some cases, standard employees have organized to support the contractors who work at their organization. The best example there is Google, where the standard workers put pressure on Google to treat its contractors better. But the response of the workforce to this is, well, it's been what I just described. It's not zero, but it's not been super effective either.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

And kind of with that following along with that thought, how has members of the American family and even Americans in general, as a result of some of these transformations and shifts and changes, how has their attitude shifted as it relates to their view of government and civic participation in relationship to, of course, union participation, but also just participation as it relates to voting and elections and believing that government can be a source for good and helping to reshape their hopes and aspirations for achieving American prosperity?

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Well, I can't speak to voting participation, but what I can speak to is that we know from a lot of research that a big source of what's going on in the country today is anger, people who feel they've been left out by the economy and are just striking out at the establishment. And it's also the case that the establishment holds a lot of the blame. And now it's obviously true that, that Trump and Trump Republicans have not been friendly at all to the protections for the workforce. But in fact, many Democrats have also not been friendly. So as an example, a number of Democratic senators voted against appointing someone to the Department of Labor in the Biden administration, someone to the Department of Labor who was in favor of expanding the definition of an employee to include rideshare drivers and food delivery drivers. And these Democratic senators voted against the appointment precisely on those grounds. So there's blame to be spread around in terms of the failure of government to be responsive to kind of economic distress. And that failure has led to a lot of the anger in this country, political anger in this country. So it's not only about this disposable worker phenomenon, but it's certainly that's a piece of it. Let me say something else. Earlier in the conversation you mentioned. What are the implications of this for a multiracial society. So my data show that if you look at the contractors and the marginal workers in my data, you know, not the freelancers, but the contractors and the marginal workers who are disposable, they're disproportionately people of color. And so, you know, there's a, there's an unequal burden there in terms of what's happening.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

And with that when you talk about so the components of American prosecutor from the perspective of families, what some call kitchen table issues. And it also relates to a care economy which is in some ways gotten a bad rap politically but is a sort of centerpiece of what everyday people care about. I mean you mentioned about how families have been affected as these transformations have taken place. It's affected childcare, the ability to be able to afford it, loss of benefits, illusion of achieving material prosperity and having a life of these, you know, taking families on vacations. Work has intensified, commutes have gotten longer, ending of paid leave. And you know, in some ways what can be said, sort of a colonizing of work hours has, you know, resurfaced and returned in a new way. So I mean, what does that say as relates to as you're speaking of the frustrations of everyday people who assume that with the march of time we would have, you know, achieved a more prosperous society. But we seem to be, you know, regressing and this balance between as you talk about the disposability of workers, the rhetoric around value of workers, but the lack of material value that's associated with compensating workers or respecting workers value via compensation. How has this shaped a particular public consciousness as it relates to some of your work?

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Yeah, I want to be clear that people on average are better off today than they were 30 years ago. Right. I mean it's not as if we're regressing to the pre post war period or even the post war period in terms of economic well being. There's been a march of progress, but it's increasingly highly uneven. So yes, people are on average better off, but today the dis. Inequality has grown considerably. So that, that's, that's a big, a big issue in terms of this. And then as I said, if you ask who are the disposable workers, they're disproportionately people of color, they're disproportionate, but not entirely obviously, but disproportionately people with lower education levels. And then the other thing in terms of the overall trend is if you look at the share of national wealth, GDP or profits or surplus, however you want to characterize it, captured in wages versus captured in profits that shifted away from wages. So labor's what economists would call labor's share has declined. And that, and that's being that gets reflected in this phenomenon. Now, again, I haven't given you the real headline. The real headline in the book is that 35%, according to my data, 35% of the American workforce falls into my disposable worker category, I.e. contract workers, freelancers, or marginal workers who are now attached to career ladders. 35%. So a third of the workforce is disposable, as I'm talking about it. That's a huge number. It's not 100% though, but. Right. There's 65% that isn't, but 35% is. And that really affects all the range of outcomes that we've talked about.

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[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

Shop [e-mail] and as you begin to talk about in chapter seven, what can be done, you know, to think about a policy agenda. Part of that does factor in. You know, what you mentioned as relates to African American workers, women, Latina Chicano workers, working class workers who haven't been featured in sort of a central way, what happens if you censure them? Particularly the case of African American workers, there's this long standing sort of marginalization and exclusion that was, you know, it was promised and supposed to have been, you know, rectified with the New Deal, but that was based upon the scaffolding of, you know, a Jane and Jim Crow system that was, you know, unequal and then even, you know, so the, the need to integrate movements of civil and human rights with movements of union, unionization also took time and, and you know, and then work to, to work through common interests. But that coupled with this sort of, you know, corporatized, continued corporatizing of America for some have created even broader gulfs that have sort of created more cleavages within the broader social effects of those individuals in the American family, particularly within African American families, families of color, poor families and the like. But what happens if you center workers and workers perspectives and agendas and how does your research speak to what that would look like to be able to address and speak to and meet some of these shifts and changes and transformations that have happened over time?

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Sure. So just as a, as an asterisk or a footnote to what you just said, the New Deal in many ways was problematic with respect to race. In order for Franklin Roosevelt to get a lot of the social legislation passed, which was great legislation fundamental to the country, nonetheless he had to exclude agricultural workers from minimum wage protections. So a lot of the African Americans in the south were not protected by New Deal New Deal laws. But that, you know, nonetheless, the New Deal was obviously on average a very positive thing. The policies around this are very complicated because at the federal level there's fundamentally two sets of legislation. There's the Fair Labor Standards act, which minimum wage overtime, and there's the National Labor Relations act which defines who's an employee for the purposes of labor organization. The Fair Labor Standards act has one definition of who's an employee. The NLRA Labor Relations act has a different definition. It's all up to the interpretation of regulatory agencies. And that gets bounced back and forth depending on the administration. So the Obama administration and the Biden administration attempted to expand the definition of employee status, for example, to include rideshare drivers. And both Trump administrations have reversed that and narrowed the definition of employee status. And different judges interpret the law differently. It's very, very uneven. There's this 33 states have passed a much more simplified definition of employee status which is broad based. But getting that done at the federal level in today's political environment is problematic. Let me Say something more generally about how to think about the problem. The book makes an analogy between firms and sharks. So I argue the analogy is that sharks are good for the ocean, they're good for the ecosystem. We want there to be sharks out there. Forget the movie Jaws, we want sharks to be out there, they're good for us. But sharks have only one objective and that is to eat. And so we create barriers, fences, underwater barriers to keep the sharks away from us, to channel their eating energy. Firms are good for us. Firms create new products, firms create jobs. Firms innovate. We want private sector firms. We want firms to have a profit motive, but they have only one profit. They have only, only one objective, only one motive, and that is to maximize profits. So just like with sharks, we need to create barriers, with firms, we need to create barriers to channel the profit motive in desirable directions, to limit the ability for the profit motive to really damage the well being of the workforce. And so this is not, my book is not an attack on capitalism, it's not an attack on employers, it's not an attack on profits. It's arguing that we need regulatory and legal constraints around it. And the development that submerged all these 35% of the workforce, which is disposable for most of those people, that's problematic. And we need to find ways to kind of raise the floor for them.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

That's a valid point. And when you talk about this emphasis and shift to shareholders as opposed to providing benefits for workers, it brings forth other metaphors and analogies like of course, playing nice in the sandbox. And, and when you think about a system having the regulatory characteristics of it help to ensure that all members are able to get equal value and that the value is able to be respected. And if workers are a centerpiece of it, and we're a working class nation, we have been built, our nation is built on working class people of varying sorts from classes, immigrant backgrounds, ethnicities, races, genders, perspectives and positions and whatnot, then that has to be ensured. Along with our founding documents. When we look at, of course, we're in the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and American notions of freedom. So how can we make that and kind of with that, what do you think about the whole presence of worker centers and how worker centers are speaking to this underrepresented group. You know, when you talk about going from high, high wage to low wage groups and in order to, to try to, to speak to those who have not been afforded protections by the NLRA and are representative of Some of the marginalized and underrepresented groups. Do you think that worker centers represent a viable model of labor organization that can be scaled from the bottom up and from, you know, as president, you know, buying, you say, the middle lap?

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Well, there's a couple of issues around worker centers. So they're a non union form of representation. Right. The big advantage of a union is it can collect dues. So it has a financial base. Worker centers only can collect dues if people voluntarily pay dues. And so they're inherently less stable and long lasting. The second issue with worker centers is that historically they've been heavily immigrant. So people, a worker center might try and organize the people standing outside a Home Depot looking for day jobs. And in some cases the worker centers have been effective about that, with that. But guess what, you're not going to have too many immigrants in this environment clustering around Home Depot because they're going to get picked up by ice, taken away. And so yeah, there's nothing wrong with worker centers, but they're not going to be. They can't scale. They just can't. Unions can scale. Other kinds of organizations can scale that are non union. But worker centers are going to have difficulty scaling and right now in this environment, they're going to have difficulty with supporting their largely immigrant constituency.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

Do you think partnering with other institutions, as has been done in previous decades and eras, like with churches and religious decisions, would that, you know, help to sort of, you know, create a broader association that could, you know, you know, expand opportunities and benefits and even protections?

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Absolutely. So I've done a lot of work over my career with these, what are called sololinsky organizations, it's called the Industrial Areas Foundation. And in fact there's, there's a chapter of the Industrial Areas foundation in Louisiana. And these organizations absolutely partner with churches and synagogues and mosques to organize and communities around many of these economic justice issues. An alliance of these IAF organizations with other social, civic society groups, ranging from unions to, to other civic society organizations, is promising. Again, the issue is scale. IAF organizing is what I would call very retail. You have house meetings, you bring people along, you train leaders, you create a powerful organization. But reaching a large scale is slow. Whereas unions can organize thousands of people at once, but without the same depth of commitment of those people to the union. But yes, I think community organizing around some of these issues is promising.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

Yes, and I appreciate you saying that. I had some time being trained in that model when I was at being an ordained minister, when I was know, I spent some time in Cleveland, Ohio. And so I certainly see the benefits of it. And thinking about the larger sort of broader sort of arc of American history, sort of the, the, the interrelationship between civil rights, social, civic groups, churches and things of that nature has a lot of viability that needs to be continually explored. And kind of along with that, but also, you know, moving somewhat tangentially, can you also speak about the issue of health and health equity and health care and the interrelationship of that work and labor pursuit of a national health insurance effort and worker protections in that regard? And I say that as someone who lives in precarity, working a part time position at an institution of higher learning, as higher learning is changing all across America, not just with AI, but a whole host of other structural and economic and social forces, but also I work as a part time. Social determinants of health. I think there may be new language now as it relates to how it's characterized with a health care coalition now we call ourselves a community resilience center. The issue of health equity speaks to how there's a lot of precarity for a lot of these families over the course of these shifts and transformations from irregular income to no health insurance, irregular scheduling, lack of paid leave, you know, having to take on two jobs working overnight shifts. And you mentioned about, you know, manpower and some of those other Kelly services, those other groups that contract work. But how does that affect the social determinants of health though? The health of everyday people, workers and families? And what does that say to the public policy issue of trying to get a public option or a universal mandate for a universal health care Medicare for all, as some say, as you have versions of it in other industrialized nations.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Well, one of the issues about health care insurance is that I said earlier that firms want to have disposable workers to avoid benefits. And one of the biggest benefits they want to avoid is having to pay for health insurance or to contribute to Obamacare if they don't provide their own insurance. A national health insurance or public, a public option would, would eliminate that incentive for disposability and might very well diminish the kind of amount, number of people, the percentage of people who are treated as disposable workers. So it's important. But again, this all comes down to a discussion about the political environment. Just as it's difficult to expand regulatory protection for, for the definition of employees, it's even more difficult to think about at this point, national health insurance. So that's a challenge as far as the impact of disposable workers on people's health. Clearly, if you're working variable hours, unpredictable hours, if your compensation is low, that's going to feed back into your mental and probably your physical health too.

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[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

And with that, you know, as we begin to sort of wind our our conversation, bring it to an end. What are the takeaways, you know, that you would you would want readers in readership, particularly our listing audience, to to know or to have and to take away from your work as it relates to the broad sweep of it, but also the policy agenda or also what what you know, what you want people to know and to grapple with and make sense of, you know, as they live day to day.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Sure. So you know the title of the book is Disposable Workers the Transformation of Employment. So the first takeaway is what we began with, namely. Increasingly, firms don't want employees. They want people to do the work, but they don't want to give them employee status. And they've come up with a series of Strategies for achieving that goal, use of contractors, use of freelancers and marginal workers. The second takeaway is the size of the problem, which is that 35% of the workforce is treated as disposable. The third takeaway is within that category. There's some heterogeneity. Some people, for example, travel nurses, are happy with their status, but overall, the consequences are lower wages, less job satisfaction, and lower commitment to doing quality work. And then the final takeaway is the complexity of policies to deal with this, the confusion in federal law, the inconsistent federal law, the difficulty at the federal level of reforming regulatory policy and law. And then there have been a set of initiatives at state and local levels to kind of overcome this. And some are quite successful and we should build on those.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

Well, I want to thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing of your time. And before we go, I'd like to ask you, what are you working on next? And what, what's what research or what, you know, what can we expect from you in the coming years that it's a follow up to this very valuable and needed work?

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

I can't really answer that question. I'm thinking about my next project. But come back in a few months and I'll have an answer. But I'll continue to work on issues around fairness and equity at work.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

That sounds good. That's fair enough. We certainly agree to that and certainly appreciate your time and your expertise and your sort of long body of work that all of it should be understood. And I say this with all honesty that I think that much of the growing public hopefully is getting a better sense of awareness about the work of scholars such as yourself and others who have dedicated your career and your work to major subjects that have public value and import, but oftentimes hasn't been fully, you know, understood or appreciated or valued to, to an extent that it should be. And for people to understand that there is a, a valuable interrelationship between work, work that's being done in the academy, you know, in archives and interviews and, and, you know, and in libraries and the like, and what's happening to everyday people of all walks of life. And so I hope that, you know, interviews like this will give opportunity to shed even more light on the great work that scholars such as yourself and others are doing. And then hopefully with the changing nature of academia and even public institutions and public sector unions and the privatization efforts that are going forward, that we can get a better value, sense of value and understanding for the work that all Americans are contributing and especially that scholarship contribute to and for the common good. So. Well, thanks so much.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Well, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

Yes, thanks so much and best wishes to you. And we look forward to talking with you again soon.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Okay, take care. Thank you.

[Interviewer / Host (Dr. Zachary Williams)]

All right, take care. Best wishes to you.

[Dr. Paul Osterman]

Bye Bye bye.

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[Dr. Paul Osterman]

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