Non-tenure-track faculty at Harvard voted overwhelmingly to unionize as Harvard Academic Workers with the United Auto Workers. The immediate backdrop is pay and inflation; the deeper story is that the academic basement has begun to organize. The people who teach and research without the security of tenure are not a fringe case. They are one front in a much larger rearrangement of work. Globalization has made the temp a global problem, not a local one. The temp has shifted from a phase of early-career accumulation to a long-term career choice for many people under the global division of labor.
By the principle of substantive equivalence, the temp is nothing new. Agricultural societies hired seasonal hands at harvest; in China, not so long ago, wheat-harvest crews and other itinerant workers moved from job to job. Industrialization pulled farmers who had lost land, or who saw the income gap between city and countryside, into urban work. They often lacked the benefits and protections of formal factory employees, but they earned far more than they could in the fields. That was the migrant-worker wave of the past several decades.
Later industrial development pushes factory workers into services as automation advances. Services are, in broad terms, contingent work. Agriculture and industry meet survival needs; services meet optional improvements. A few days without music, restaurants, or movies will not kill anyone. A few days without food or electricity will. Service employment will absorb most future workers. Human relationships offer more room for arbitrage; the relationship between people and nature or machines touches basic livelihood, and capital there is constrained by the state.
At the national level, comparative advantage moves dirty, dangerous, and demanding work outward. Developed economies concentrate on service industries that can make money without heavy physical risk. Manufacturing and the dirtiest service jobs either migrate to developing countries or fall to illegal and new immigrants. The first path produced the global rise of Chinese manufacturing; it is now being taken up by Southeast Asia, South Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The wealth-creation myth usually does not last more than a generation. The second path creates an employment paradox. Many locals do not work and live on welfare, which raises unemployment; at the same time, jobs locals refuse go unfilled. Open immigration and locals complain that jobs are being stolen. Restrict immigration and they complain that whole sectors have no workers. Politicians respond with policies that are, in essence, temp-worker programs.
Japan has been a live test case for aging and low fertility, so it recognized the shortage of 3K work early: dirty, dangerous, and demanding jobs. One response is the newspaper-delivery scholarship student. Work that Japanese workers avoid is outsourced to international students under a scholarship label. Taiwan has opened 3K work and set a wage that is low by local standards but attractive in South and Southeast Asia. In the United States, Mexican workers can enter on temporary visas during harvest; California orchards are especially hard to mechanize, and the H-2A visa exists for that labor. The logic is clear: developed regions want migrant labor for 3K jobs, not for jobs locals also want. Taiwan has around 100,000 missing or unaccounted migrant workers. Many find that their assigned work is better than what they could get at home but much worse than what locals earn. Some go underground, run food stalls, and earn more than they did in 3K work, which puts pressure on local livelihoods. Temp work at the national scale demands high migration capacity. Otherwise refugee inflows, undocumented migrants, and local underemployment can overwhelm the system.
Cities show the same pattern more directly. Expansion brings conflict between old and new residents: Beijing's south and north, Shanghai residents and migrants from northern Jiangsu, New York's discrimination against Irish and Italian arrivals. Jobs old residents avoid get pushed to newcomers, and newcomers become associated with dirty, messy, and poor sectors, which feeds discrimination. The economic gap may close after a generation, but the stereotype settles into urban culture and lasts much longer. Most cities have public services and benefits reserved for established residents. Newcomers qualify only after long tax payments or investment; short-term temps contribute to city building but receive no benefits. A city needs couriers, waiters, and elder-care workers, jobs locals often will not do. If those jobs are restricted to locals, the service premium lowers the city's competitiveness. If the market is left alone, slums or urban villages form where workers in dirty and messy trades cluster. These workers know locals are unlikely to accept them as residents, so they minimize living costs, save, and return home. Wages in such jobs are usually higher than at home. Staying or switching careers is easier than it looks; a generation can produce a new set of locals. The newest locals are often the most hostile to outsiders, pulling up the ladder in school districts, health insurance, and housing.
For an individual, temp work was supposed to be a stage of growth. Waiting tables, caddying at a golf course, and working a cash register were once standard student jobs in the United States; students gained social experience and savings. In China, many university students of a certain generation handed out flyers or tutored. Those were valuable experiences. Today many minimum-wage temps in the United States are middle-aged, or older people with insufficient pensions. The employment data looks decent, but the temp share has risen sharply. Japan's dispatch-worker system deserves a similar look. Japanese firms are known for seniority-based employment and no layoffs, yet the dispatch-worker share has risen, mainly among older people. Setting aside international competition, the ideal individual arc would be part-time and dirty work during school, stable employment until retirement, then a return to temp work after medical advances leave pensions inadequate or home life too dull. The reality may be that the stable-employment link never arrives, and a person spends a lifetime as a service temp.
The opposite of the temp is the permanent post or establishment status. In experience-dependent livelihood sectors, permanence has some logic. Doctors and firefighters need stable expectations; if their ranks churn, society suffers. In other sectors, such as competitive sports and entertainment, the work itself requires young, healthy temps. Athletes and performers must earn enough before thirty, because physiology will eliminate them after that. Once a service economy begins absorbing most employment, most permanent posts and establishment status should be eliminated. The core question is simple: who needs establishment? Entrepreneurs do not. Craftsmen with unique skills do not. The most capable people do not cling to stability; they choose more challenging paths with higher returns. Who needs it? Often intellectuals who are better than some and worse than others. They have education and benefited from past growth, but they know they are not suited to high-risk fields. Establishment status masks mediocre ability and outdated views, and they will trade high pay for it. The policy implication is clear: low pay with high stability. High pay with high stability invites corruption.
In research, the pattern is visible. Some posts have teaching titles but no tenure; if the person cannot win grants and cannot raise money, the door is open. In many U.S. universities and institutes, tenure is often nominal. Tenure lets people coast, but pay is much lower. Researchers who are aggressive about grants do not treat tenure as the goal; it is a byproduct of career development. They keep raising money before and after tenure. The Chinese push to adopt tenure systems is therefore puzzling in one respect: the promised freedom to research after tenure is rarely visible, and most professors still work their own patch. But using tenure systems to raise postdoc and young-faculty pay substantially makes sense. Research is a young person's game. The best incentive for young researchers is better pay; a few years as a temp in exchange for a low-income establishment post can be economically rational. The worst outcome is low pay when young people should be producing, plus an establishment post that may or may not matter. That produces Harvard-style union struggles and internal friction. It would be better to abolish establishment status and let the market price the work. Pure science, literature, and art may still need tenure protection. In applied disciplines, tenure has little real meaning and becomes a source of later conflict, including an excuse to suppress younger non-tenure colleagues.
The broader point is that more temp work follows from the shift of industrial populations into services. If formal workers or locals will not do dirty 3K jobs, the answer is higher pay for outsiders, young people, or retirees, which also keeps them from taking other jobs. In sectors that retain establishment status, wages or real benefits should fall, or the status should be abolished. Otherwise, the result is a less dynamic society, more rigid class lines, and a wider wealth gap.