Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- A Perfect Marriage: Flexible Employment Standards and the Staffing Industry -- Inside Employment Agency Labor: Participant Observation Experiences -- Exchange Alley: The Origins of Employment Agencies -- From Slave Agency to Temporary Help: The Historical Development of Employment Agencies -- The Poverty of Work: Shifting from Jobs that Solved Poverty to Jobs that Make It -- Preventing the Reproduction of Deprived Employment Statuses among Temporary Laborers -- Appendix -- Bibliography -- Index.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

In The Poverty of Work , Van Arsdale goes inside the world of temping and discovers a type of work dreadfully insecure yet growing rapidly. Furthermore, through a comprehensive historiography, he illustrates how employment agencies moved from England to North America during the colonial period, where they sold workers into many deprived employment statuses, including indentured servitude and slavery. Van Arsdale contends that had the history of employment agencies been better understood, they would have likely been abolished with slavery, or at the very least, more tightly controlled by government. Today, left largely unregulated, employment agencies are powerful corporations generating astonishing revenue by selling flexible, on-demand temporary workers. Unfortunately, this labor is trapping millions in a cycle of unemployment, despair, and poverty.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.