Guerrillas in
Our Midst: Two of the talkative temps got job interviews
after their Pioneer Square protest.
A couple of weeks ago, a cluster of young ladies stood
in Pioneer Square decked out in businesswear and hoisting
signs such as "Will Work for $35K." It turns out they recently
lost their temp jobs--and promises of future riches--at
a local dot.com company when it started running out of cash.
Rather than calculating their stock options, they were suddenly
out on the streets, passing out "guerillatemp" business
cards. Freelancer Elizabeth Dye caught up with the trio
last week. They wouldn't name the company that dumped them,
but they offered their thoughts on the life of the working
girl in the Internet era.
Willamette Week: Can you talk about what the
company does?
Gretchen: What the company does is still pretty
unclear to us. I think there was a sense that it was trying
to be a portal.
So on a day-to-day basis, you come in the door...
Heidi: They set us down in the conference room,
said, 'This is the Web site,' showed us what to do and what
it was going to look like, and explained what the opportunity
was going to be. I think everyone else was just thrown in
and given the information and told, 'Go.'
Allison: The day after Heidi started, my supervisor
said, 'Just ask Heidi what to do.' It was pretty self explanatory--surf
the Web for specific information and enter data into a form.
So to what extent do you think the job conforms to the
cliché of the dot-com opportunity?
Heidi: Oh, perfectly. There were whiteboards everywhere
and yellow sticky notes all over the place. We were all
in a big room, and people's cell phones were ringing all
the time. They told us to bring headphones to listen to
at work; everyone was wearing jeans and T-shirts.
You all expected to go from being temps to being permanent
employees. Why is that?
Heidi: I had a job interview for another position.
I came back in after the interview and my supervisor took
me aside and said, 'Would you be interested in taking a
position with us if one became available?' I thought that
the job would be a good match for the time being. It had
excellent benefits. I was getting a sense that people listened
to my opinion, that I was being taken as a full partner
in decisions that affected my common area.
Gretchen: I was in a slightly different position.
Two or three days after I started at the company, I was
offered a consulting position with another Internet company
in Portland that paid, I think, very well. But as a consultant
your hours are limited and I certainly wasn't receiving
benefits. So I asked them if they were going to be able
to bring me on full time or not.
What was the response to that?
Gretchen: 'Oh, we want to, we want to bring you
on.' I said, 'Well, I'm sure you've seen my resume. What
can I tell you about my background that will help you bring
me on?' And he had no idea about my academic background,
even though it was relevant to the position they were hiring
for. He had never seen my résumé. I don't
think they had information about us.
Did the company tank?
Allison: Yes and no.
Tell me what happened.
Gretchen: On Monday our supervisor called everyone
into the conference room and said we were going to have
a meeting, which was strange because we usually meet in
this cavernous communal work room. We file in, there is
someone who looks suspiciously like a lawyer there.
How many employees are in the company?
Gretchen: About 25. So we go into this conference
room and there is a lawyer with this big stack of papers.
The CEO looks like he's going to cry and tells us that the
bridge funding has not come through, says something about
how they couldn't have foreseen this, which we all know
is ridiculous.
I'm about to use a terrible dot-com cliche: What's the
take-away from this experience? Do you think there is a
peculiar lesson to learn from working for a very precarious
contingent technology company?
Gretchen: Working for any Internet company is like
being a temp. Except no one is taking a cut.
Heidi: Everyone keeps saying unemployment is so
low, everyone is hiring. I don't have to worry about being
unemployed; I know that my temp agency will find me a job.
The fear that I have is doing something that is going to
rot my brain.
Gretchen: The other fear that we have is doing something
that will not give us health benefits. No job security.
As a temp you are a sub-human worker even if you are doing
something really complicated or that people could be paid
much more to do.
Allison: Something we've been talking about is that
temps are incredibly isolated. Before we worked together
on this job, I didn't even know any other temps. I was the
only temp on the corporate jobs I was assigned to. I didn't
really have contact with other temps.
Gretchen: Temping is a very gendered profession,
if you want to call it a profession. The other day I was
in a meeting. I was the only woman, and I was the only person
that was dressed well. I was in a suit, and everyone else
was in torn-up jeans and sweat shirts, and afterward one
of my colleagues said something funny about the way I was
dressed. He thought it was good to dress down. And I said,
'You don't understand, the only reason I get as much respect
as I did in that meeting is because I was dressed better
than any of you.' He said, 'The Internet is breaking these
things down. Not only the distinction between business and
casual, but gender distinctions and class distinctions.'I
just laughed.
Well, it is a pretty ridiculous claim, considering
that the Internet is overwhelmingly dominated by
men.
Gretchen: That's right, the funniest thing about
business casual is that you walk into an office that is
business casual and see men in T-shirts and shorts and you
see women anything but casual. If you do happen to wear
shorts and a T-shirt, you will not be treated the same.
Heidi: It's very easy as a woman and as a temp at
an office to turn into domestic help. I think that's something
that breaks temps, more than it breaks permanent hires:
That you are a second-class citizen, and as much as you
may say it's about, 'You're a temp,' it's about 'You're
a woman' and that's a large part of the reason that you
are a temp. So the way that people are currently sourcing
employees creates a kind of invisible, I don't want to say
glass ceiling, but invisible division of labor.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published May 10,
2000
|
