Contingent work in the US recycling industry: Permatemps and precarious green jobs

Abstract

Over the last decade US economic policy discourse has held that a turn toward green industry (e.g., renewable energy, recycling, green construction), is a vital solution to the dual crises of environmental degradation and the erosion of high quality blue collar work. At the same time, the US economy has seen the expansion of ever more precarious and contingent work. One manifestation of this increase of precarious work is the growth of the temp industry and particularly the proliferation of permatemps—workers pursuing fulltime, permanent employment through staffing services, often in insecure and poorly-compensated positions. In this research we explore the experience of work in recycling plants in the US and analyze the entwinement of recycling companies and temp agencies. Based on interviews and observations at recycling plants and temp agencies in three Central Illinois counties, we find that recycling companies face a management tension in which workers must be highly regimented but also very flexible—choreographed yet unscripted. Recyclers turn to temp agencies to resolve this tension. Temp firms provide a flexible-yet-vulnerable workforce and in other ways assist recyclers in regulating labor and producing vulnerability, which transforms workers into fungible bodies trapped on a treadmill of low-wage work. The fundamentally unsafe and insecure character of recycling work calls into question the rosy notion of high-quality, career track green collar jobs. Instead, temp work in the recycling industry exemplifies precariousness.