Jobs: What It Means To Be ‘Disposable’ At Work

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0:25The way we work has changed dramatically over the last decade. Using AI is quickly becoming the norm in many workplaces, but just a few years ago, it felt closer to science fiction. And the hybrid work model that began during the pandemic has made remote work much more common. We've also seen shifts around what it means to be an essential worker. It's a term that became widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic, but has largely fallen out of our vocabulary. This category included health care and government workers, those in transportation, food and agriculture, water and waste management. Today, MIT professor Paul Osterman has a different name for a growing segment of the work population that includes those we once deemed essential, disposable.

1:09My name's Rebecca. I live in Greene County, Wisconsin. I'm a contractor. I definitely feel disposable. I have no benefit. I have no voice in the company. My work is fine. I get paid well. Fortunately, though, in the last few years with the changes in our government, I'm unable to afford health care. Even though I'm paid well, it just doesn't make sense for me to get health insurance at the rate I was quoted because I'm 62. So, yeah, definitely feeling disposable. Unlike essential workers, the disposable workforce isn't defined by the services they offer, but by the weakening contract between them and their employers.

1:46I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. In honor of Labor Day Week, we're discussing what it means to be disposable in today's labor market and what you can do about it. Stay with us.

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2:40It's therapy tailored to the individual to help lighten what you carry. Match with a therapist who truly understands. Visit betterhelp.com slash NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor Carvana. Carvana believes selling your car should be easy. Get a real offer down to the penny, picked up from your driveway. You may keep waiting for a catch. There isn't one. Sell today at Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply. Let's meet our guests. Paul Osterman joins us. He's Professor Emeritus of Human Resources and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He's also the author of the new book, Disposable Workers, the Transformation of Employment.

3:23Professor Osterman, welcome back to the program. Jen, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Also with us is Bridget Schulte. She's a journalist and author of Overwork, Transforming the Daily Grind and the Quest for a Better Life. Bridget, it's great to have you back. Oh, it's good to be here. And Brianna Caza. She's a professor of management at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Professor Caza, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. Now, Professor Osterman, I want to start with this term, disposable worker. based on your definition, what kinds of workers fall under that umbrella?

3:57Sure. So the general definition is that a disposable worker is someone who, when they're hired, the employer has no interest in keeping them. We're all employees at will. We can be fired normally. But usually, for most people, for standard workers, when they're hired, the employer intends to keep them around. Disposable workers, that's just not true. So let me give you three categories or three examples. So contractors, like the woman we just, Rebecca, we just heard from. A contractor could be a building cleaner at the low end. It could be a travel nurse at the high end. They work for a staffing agency.

4:38They're not attached to the firm for whom they work. Freelancers. So freelancers could be an Uber driver, a DoorDash driver. It could also be a freelance journalist they are 1099s they don't pay they don't receive any benefits from an employer and then another category that i make uh salient in the book and which is new to the conversation or what i term marginal workers these folks are w-2s they're attached to an employer in that sense but the employer has no intention of building careers for them adjunct faculty is an example Staff attorneys are examples. Many part-time jobs are examples of marginal workers and low-wage service workers.

5:26The employer hires them but does not invest in training, does not give them a pension. Adjunct faculty have no chance for a tenure. Staff attorneys will never be even considered for partnerships and so on. So those are examples of disposable workers. I think most people will have a visceral reaction to using the term disposable when talking about human beings. Why did you choose that term to describe the relationship between certain workers and their employer? Well, that's very interesting. I went back and forth quite a bit with the publisher about that term. My original thought was to use the term spare parts, but they told me that was even more offensive.

6:10but but i'm talking about it from the point of view of the employer it's not my judgment about these folks it's what the employer thinks about them and to give you a kind of an illustration of how employers think now you may i hope you ask me what what are the motivations of employers for doing this but just to give you an illustration mckinsey which is kind of the exemplar of of Business in America issued a report two years ago in which it said that 95 % of a firm's value is produced by 5 % of its employees. Now, think about what that means about the firm's attitude towards those other people who are not 5%.

6:53They're disposable. Lack of respect. And so that's why I use that term. It reflects what the employer is thinking, not what I'm thinking. We'll get into motivations a little later, but Professor Kaza, I want to bring you in here because roughly one in four skilled knowledge workers freelanced or worked independently in 2024. And when we talk about skilled knowledge workers, we're talking about people who've acquired a level of expertise through education or training or whose work involves mental labor as opposed to physical labor. And all that's according to a 2025 study from Upwork. When we use the term gig worker, though, I think we often think of, say, ride share drivers or food delivery drivers.

7:37But how do you define who gig workers are in the current economy and the type of work that term encompasses? I think that's a great question. I do think that we often conflate gig work with app-managed low wage service roles, like maybe the rideshare drivers or delivery workers. But in our research, we actually look at white-collar professionals, so highly skilled, highly educated knowledge workers like corporate consultants, graphic designers, software engineers, independent scientists, and very often editors who will operate on a project basis. So there are a growing segment of the economy that is project-based knowledge work.

8:18So, you know, gig work to us is any arrangement where an independent worker delivers a defined project-based task or a service, and they do it across temporary client contracts rather than through traditional full-time employment with one particular organization. So, I really appreciated Paul's categorization, and I think my colleagues and I would think of all of those three categories as gig workers because they are working on a gig basis as opposed to an ongoing traditional employment basis. We'll get more into how we got here later, but Bridget, you have a term of your own called the crapification of work, and this is less about a particular group of workers and more about the way work in the U.S.

9:03has changed more broadly. What does the crapification of work look like? Yeah, well, everything that we've been talking about is a big part of it. You know, people seem to, you know, we talk about with nostalgia a time when, you know, you could work with one company and you retired at, say, IBM and you got your gold watch at 50 years. You know, where you had a lot of stability and predictability. Or, you know, we talk about blue collar jobs when they paid enough for you to own a home and you could afford a car and you could afford your life and even a vacation sometimes. And a lot of those jobs really are gone.

9:43When I talk about the crapification, we have, as we're talking about, far more contract, involuntary part-time gig work. But even that precarity that you talked about in white-collar jobs, there's some really interesting studies on stress, kind of work-related stress. and the levels, you used to be protected in the white collar professions because there was so much stability there and you are no longer protected. The stress levels are also really high there because think about it. I mean, how many times do we open the newspaper or listen to the news in the morning and there's another layoff at some, you know, you're not sort of protected anymore.

10:24And then it's very difficult in the United States in many professions and particularly certain ages or women or particularly older women, And once you're laid off, it's very difficult to get back in, very difficult to get back in at that same level. Well, that echoes this email we got from Paula who says, I'm a highly qualified analyst with a graduate degree. I've been looking for a permanent position for a year and a half. I'm in my late 50s and can't even get interviews. I finally accepted a contract position for half my prior wage. I'm overqualified, bored by the position, and never felt more disposable.

10:57Maybe it's time to retire. I mean, Professor Osterman, when you hear a message like that, how does it fit into your analysis of how employers' thinking about the workforce has changed? Sure. So let me just make a couple of comments. One is I should have added that I have data. I interviewed 6 ,000 people. And my estimate is that 35 % of the workforce is disposable in the categories that I just described. That's a huge number of people. uh staying on the on the definition point for a second if you think of gigs now everyone uses that term differently and there's no quote right or wrong way to use that term and what brianna said is perfectly reasonable definition but if you think of it as narrow you know uber drivers door dash drivers those kinds of jobs or people who get their work on their their assignments on upwork or some website like that those folks account for just two percent of the workforce And that's my data, but that's other people's data too.

12:01And so I think this disposable category more generally is a much bigger, bigger deal. We have to take a quick break, but we'll hear more from our guests and from you after this.

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13:52Professor Osterman, I want to better understand what makes this group of disposable workers, as you've described them, more vulnerable than what you would call a standard employee, someone with benefits and legal protections. Sure. So the point is that the employer makes no commitment to these folks. And one of the main motivations is saving costs, which often means reducing wages and not paying benefits. So I want to be clear, there's heterogeneity. So travel nurses who are contractors are buying, and I interviewed a bunch, are by and large happy campers, right? They can live where they want to live, often in warm places in the winter and beach places in the summer.

14:35But in general, my data show that compensation is lower for disposable workers, that job satisfaction is lower. And I should also add that there's a consequence for the public. So a great study showed that in hospitals, the rate of infections among patients in the hospital is higher if the hospital is using contractors to do the cleaning. Why? Because the contractors receive less training, They have poor communication channels with the other folks in the hospital, and that leads to infections. And that's also true for industrial accidents. And so there's a public consequence to this, and there's a personal consequence for the folks who are disposable.

15:19Professor Kaza, I'm curious whether there's also a class of worker who looks at the current state of our economy and our work environments and say, you know what, I want to develop a different relationship with my employer. I want more independence. I want more choice about who I work for and for how long. I think that that is definitely true. We have found in our research that it is a very heterogeneous population, as was mentioned. And in particular, some people feel like it's an empowered choice to be independent. So travel nurses, I think, is such an excellent example. We know, especially during the pandemic, that they were very much in demand, could command a very high salary.

16:09And they very much felt liberated by the option to work on a contract basis. But there are some, and in particular parts of the economy, certain industries, that feel like it's a forced reality, that they don't have options. And so, you know, they're overqualified, and yet they're still disposable because they're at the whim of the organization to do one particular project. They don't feel like the organization wants to keep them on an ongoing basis. So we really feel like it's a split between workers who freely choose independent work and those who find it to be kind of more of a tradeoff for them, that they have gained autonomy and freedom from internal corporate politics, that sort of thing.

16:54But in exchange, they have no institutional safety net. They don't have formal grievance structures. They don't have kind of predictable, prepackaged workplace relationships that they can rely on when they're trying to move their career forward. So I think it's a really kind of complex narrative. And I also think that it changes as workers move up in their careers. So at some point, it could feel like it's more of a choice. And then other times, it definitely feels like it is more of a forced reality. Well, we got this email from Rodney who says, it sounds like a disposable worker is no different from that of the early industrial age, where they hired workers whenever they needed a project to be done.

17:34And when the project was done, they're basically let go. And there was usually no form of health or protection if they had an accident or died. So it sounds like we're going back to that. Now, we should acknowledge temporary and contract work has been a part of the American story in the American labor market for a very long time. An estimated 64 million Americans did freelance work in 2024, and that's up from 4 million people from 2022. That's also according to the Upwork Research Institute. The independent job platform MBO Partners estimates that more than 72 million Americans are freelancing in some capacities.

18:08So that's half, close to half of the entire workforce. I mean, Bridget, why are so many people working outside of the standard employee model. How did we get here? Well, for some people, they've been forced into that. As we've been talking, I've been thinking a lot about women or people with care responsibilities. In labor and data figures, we talk about how women-owned businesses are the fastest growing part of the economy, and they have been for years. Well, one of the main reasons why, or a key reason why, is because the corporate structures don't work for them. Work does not work for people, for many people who have care responsibilities or, you know, we don't have public policies that would promote paid time off of work in order to care or child care.

18:58We don't support child care. Or now as the population continues to grow older, we don't have benefits that would help people combine work and care. So women for decades have just left to kind of create their own businesses or their own situation. The danger with that is then again you look at, well, who raises the money? Who's able to make a good living that way? You've traded stability and hopefully good wages for a lot of unpredictability. Yes, it gives you independence and some freedom, but a lot of women run very small, you know, very small businesses, and you've taken all of that risk on yourself then.

19:46You know, and how we got here, you know, a couple things. The United States, in the United States, jobs are really expensive because employers are expected to pay for health insurance. That's a huge reason why you have a lot of jobs than going overseas. We've seen that over the past couple decades, you know. And a lot of people think, well, that's just the way it has to be here. But that was really an artifact of the Second World War. People don't understand. That was supposed to be a temporary measure, and then it just became ingrained. And so that's made jobs incredibly expensive. It's made people try to hang on to jobs that they don't like.

20:22So it's called job lock, just so that you can have health insurance. So I think that's one part of it, that jobs are expensive. So employers are always looking for places to cut. and they're looking for places to cut sort of for the second reason that jobs have become so crummy out of a host. It's a complicated story, but I guess another key thing that I would say is corporations became very interested in focusing on how do we return profits for shareholders rather than how do we ensure that our workforce is educated and well-trained and they have the benefits they need to survive and thrive outside of work.

21:01So that's one of the reasons that drives layoffs because then if you reduce your labor costs, your books look better for your quarterly earnings reports for your shareholders on Wall Street. And so we have these forces that have sort of led people. Then you put tax policy on top of that. It's a complicated picture, but basically what's really ended up happening is a transfer of power from workers. It's a transfer of control from workers to the ownership class. You can see that in wage stagnation compared to productivity. As productivities continue to rise, wages have not kept pace for the most part with that.

21:44So you've got economists at RAND who looked at wealth transfer. They figured there's something like$5 trillion in wealth that's transferred from the lowest percentiles of wealth to the upper percentiles of wealth just because of some of these. So we've incentivized corporations to invest less in their workforces because we've made it more expensive because of health care to maintain what we consider standard employees. But they're also incentivized to pay more to their shareholders. We got this email from Dee who says, your definition of disposable is too narrow. In many food service jobs, for example, employees are carefully kept under the threshold for benefits.

22:33Reduced hours mean that these workers need multiple jobs to survive. Decent health insurance is too expensive for these people. And so, Professor Osterman, what Dee is arguing here is that they don't plan on letting these workers go. They just plan to keep them below the threshold at which they'd have to pay for health insurance. Can you see a little more expansive of a definition around this idea of who's disposable? Let me say, if I can make just three points, including responding to that. We need to be very careful about the data. So the Upwork data that you're citing give numbers that are quite wild with respect to employers.

23:13And I can distinguish in my research between people who are freelancers for organizations versus people who are freelancers because they're walking your dog or helping take care of your mother or cleaning your gutters. Those are all freelancers, but they're not disposable in the way we're talking about here. They're not working for an employer in a disposable way. So we need to be, I think, more precise about the data. But when you say, for instance, a dog walker, that can be an independent contractor or they can work as part of a company. Same thing with a caregiver. They may work for a company that lets people hire out caregivers.

23:52So how are you making the distinction? By asking people the question in my survey, which is, for whom do you work? And so I can make that distinction. And so these are people who may be working independently to, say, provide caregiving services as opposed to working for a caregiving agency. Right. They're not disposable. They're not disposable, as I'm using the term. I care about people who firms use and treat in a disposable way. Second point, and then I'll come back to you about the part-time. The second point is I want to be clear that there's a section in the book called The Kids Are Okay.

24:27The rhetoric that young people today don't want careers, they want to be entrepreneurs, they want to jump around, that's just wrong. That reflects a small slice of America. In general, people do want careers. They do want stable jobs. In terms of the part-time, I completely agree with the person who wrote to you. And I spend time on this. Officially, people make a distinction between voluntary and involuntary part-time labor. That's what the Department of Labor data are. But in fact, firms create part-time jobs for the reason you said or the reason your listener said to avoid benefits. And they also create part-time jobs because part-time work is much higher turnover.

25:10And so they're not making any commitment to people because they know they're going to be gone soon. So part-time work, not all part-time jobs, but many are what I consider to be disposable jobs. Professor Kaz, I'd love your thoughts as well. I think that one of the things that comes up as I hear Professor Osterman talking is that I think that disposable workers seem to be those who are more dependent on a single firm or organization as opposed to those who might be working across employers. So in the example he gave of a dog walker or somebody who was providing caregiving service, they have multiple employers.

25:51And so even though they are still on a contract basis for those multiple employers, if they were to lose one, they're not really feeling the pain as much as if they are a part-time employee for one single organization. And in that case, they are much more disposable from the organization's perspective. Well, Bridget, I want to turn to you here because we hear a lot from people who are forced to cobble together multiple freelance or temporary jobs just to approach, you know, a standard of financial security that a standard full-time job would provide. Where do they fit into this conversation around disposability?

26:31Yes, really, they're a really important part of it. Honestly, we are creating jobs that are simply not big enough to support a human life, you know, with all of these jobs that are just under the 30-hour threshold, so then you don't have to pay for benefits. You don't have to invest. You don't have to provide a career path or a ladder forward. You know, many of these jobs, say, in retail or in the lower-wage work, hourly workforce, they also come with really unpredictable hours. There's a lot of schedule, volatility, unpredictability, so you not only, You don't know when you're going to work. You don't know how many hours you're going to work.