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THE WAY PEOPLE WORK IS changing. Machines and computers reduce the need for labor. Companies have shifted to hiring relatively few permanent staff and opting instead to strike temporary contracts with outside workers.

Uber, the ride-sharing behemoth, is perhaps the best known of these modern companies, with its thousands of drivers operating as independent contractors, but it did not invent the form. The roots of the gig economy go all the way back to the years after World War II, with the creation of the first temp and consulting agencies, including Manpower Inc. and McKinsey & Co.

In his new book, "Temp: How American Work, American Business and the American Dream Became Temporary," historian Louis Hyman – himself a former McKinsey consultant – probes the past and the development of the temporary economy for answers about the future of work. He recently spoke to U.S. News about how the economy is changing, perhaps – eventually – for the better. Excerpts:


The questions about the future of work raised by the shift to the gig economy are obviously a source of a lot of anxiety right now. What do you think is going to happen going forward?

We're always raised with an expectation that a normal job is 9-to-5. It's secure, it's long term, we might get benefits. And if we don't get that, then somehow we've failed or somehow we're outside of what is normal. And increasingly in our economy in the last 10, 20, 30 years, there's been an expansion of all these kinds of jobs that look very different than those jobs that we thought we might have.


We will see work become less tied to a particular employer in lots of ways. For some people, that's fantastic, If you're a consultant or independent contractor and you have lots of control over your life and you get paid pretty well, then this is a fabulous turn. And if you are a gig worker and you are running errands for somebody else, it's kind of a nightmarish turn.

There's something really viscerally American about the idea of working for yourself, controlling your own time, controlling your own labor, and that's something that we lost in the 20th century when we traded autonomy for security. In the 21st century, we have this opportunity to have both autonomy and security. And if we can figure that out, I think everybody will be financially better off. But I also think that spiritually and emotionally, we'll just all be more human like that instead of feeling like we're instrumental.

People say they want flexibility, but do they actually like it when they get it?

In the early period after World War II, when temporary labor first emerged, it was mostly women. The imagination of the guy who started [Manpower Inc.], Elmer Winter, was that it would be for women who were married, who had children, who had other obligations. They would work part time – and not in a permanent part-time way, but in a flexible, ad hoc way. That really changes over the '60s and '70s, and we start to see temps become more of a permanent part of the labor force. And this really expands in the '80s and '90s. This is the antecedent of today's gig economy, and a lot of the questions that we ask about the gig economy people talked about during the rise of the temp economy. Flexibility on whose terms?

Do people really want full-time work? Do they want secure work? And the answer is, yes and no. Everybody likes to work when they want to work, just like every employer wants workers who will start and stop as needed. How do we create a system where work can be flexible but we can still have a baseline level of security for our health and our families that allows us to take risks and be entrepreneurial and explore new economic possibilities?


People who are independent contractors and feel like they are in charge of their lives, feel like they can determine how they work and when they work, they love it. It's very different for people at the bottom of the gig economy, the people who feel pressed, who are very worried about how many hours they can drive their Uber car for.

"It's not an algorithm that made this possible, it's a set of terrible jobs that don't provide enough to live on."

It's important to realize that the choice is not between secure, stable work in a factory or in an office for a lot of people that are doing these gig economy jobs. It's a choice between driving an Uber and slinging coffee at Starbucks, a place you may or may not get the hours you need. Uber is the waste product of the service economy, because that's the alternative. The alternative is the insecure work at the bottom of the ladder. That's the real truth of the matter: It's not an algorithm that made this possible, it's a set of terrible jobs that don't provide enough to live on.

Many of the workers in temp jobs have traditionally been on the margins – people of color, women, migrants and now people who are overseas. Has that continued to be true, with more and more people participating in the gig economy?

The rehearsal for the gig economy was done through women and people of color and migrants – both undocumented and legal – and it really was about who counted in the economy, who deserved legal protections, who deserved economic security. What our society decided by its laws, by its institutions, was that was married white men who are American. Today, it's still disproportionately those kinds of people, the people who aren't considered deserving of stable work. There's still a bias toward having white men in those secure jobs, but it has spread. I think you can see the way in which this is frustrating, particularly to the white men, as their jobs begin to disappear, as they are subcontracted out, and this insecurity that begin on the margins has crept into the center of our market.

People obviously have talked about the contingent workers for a long time, but it's certainly when white men are threatened it becomes a real problem, quote-unquote. Just like when the drug crisis was disproportionately happening to urban African-Americans, it wasn't as big a deal or it was criminalized, whereas the opioid crisis is a medical crisis now that it affects rural whites. It's hard not to see these things as filtered through a prism of race and gender. That's the question for the 21st century: Can we construct the kind of capitalism that is more inclusive, that is more stable, that doesn't have to draw these lines between certain groups of people and other groups of people in its growth?

As mechanization, computerization, automation have taken over many tasks previously done by humans, is the idea that robots could take over everything possible? Are there some jobs that can never be replaced?

There are things that humans can do that robots can't do. The utopian futurist in me says, look, no human should do the work of the machine. There was a time in the 19th century when nearly everybody worked in agriculture. And when the harvest came, we had to cut down all the wheat. The vast majority of Americans did this. And then came the mechanical thresher that eliminated all those jobs. Now, was this bad? No, it liberated us to do other things that only humans could do.


The trick was dislocation and people had a hard time finding their way in that new world. We could have done a better job of it. This is partly why there was so much political unrest over the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I hope we can learn from our history so that when AI comes and replaces many of our dull repetitive jobs that we do, it will be a moment of liberation, rather than a moment of immiseration.

I do think that things humans will always do are things that are caring, things that are curious and things that are creative. Humans are the best at caring for other humans. A machine will never be curious. There's a lot to learn and do and create, and many of us have jobs like that now. But the majority of us have jobs that are repetitive and dull. And as we think about the postwar [period] and we think about those office and factory jobs, we should think about the fact that they were tedious, terrible, inhumane, soul-breaking jobs. Nobody likes to stand in an assembly line turning a wrench for eight or 10 hours a day, nobody. Everybody would rather play with their kids or drink a beer or go fishing or write poetry. How do we make that happen for people?

Is there a world where that provides enough need for labor so that everyone who wants to work can?

Do we have to connect income with jobs as cleanly as we did for 150 years, or are there ways to empower people to be more independent or to figure out ways to really make sure that this rise in productivity helps everybody? What are we trying to solve for? Are we trying to make sure that everyone has to do terrible jobs so that they can live? Or are we trying to accelerate economic growth and create a better life for all of us?


I don't think that's incompatible with capitalism. Capitalism has reinvented itself many times in its history. It used to be dependent on slavery, then it was dependent on oil, and now it's dependent on digital computational power. As we think about these transitions, they seem to be getting better. This is a moral question of whether we work for the economy or whether the economy works for us. Will there be people who will be dislocated in the process? Yes, there will be. But the overall promise is really important.

For 100 years, we've learned in our schools, in our jobs, how to be more like machines, obeying and doing what we're told. There's a cultural shift that has to accompany this economic shift. For me, that's going to be the harder part. It's pretty easy to write a policy or create a new app. It's very, very difficult to shift our way of thinking what's important. In the end, it's rooted in this very old American dream of self-determination. Maybe I'm just too optimistic, but I think it could be great.

What does the reduced role of unions mean? Can labor laws be implemented to protect gig workers? Is that necessary?

There's about twice as many people in the gig economy as there are in private sector unions right now. We have to realize that the economy has changed. Right now, there's lots of people who are trying to figure out how to organize workers in ways to counter the power of organized business. It may or may not be legal, just like it actually wasn't when the CIO was organized in the 1930s in the great Flint sit-down strike, when the workers occupied a General Motors plant and demanded that GM give them concessions. It was made legal afterwards by the laws. We have to realize the law is important, but the law can't fundamentally alter the balance of power.And until workers find a way to organize more powerfully in this economy, the law won't be enough.