Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  Other observers—like late landscape writer John Brinckerhoff Jackson—have taken a different view. Indeed, Jackson, even though he understood profoundly how essential an abiding sense of place was to the well-being of any society, might also be called America’s most significant modern-day philosopher of the temporary. He coined the phrase “the landscape of the temporary” and affirmed it as the most typical American landscape. It evolved, he thought, out of forms of mobility that have always distinguished (and enlivened) American culture; he maintained, moreover, that a new sense of place might even come out of the fluid margins and roadways of American life. If people create their own worlds (and I believe they do), then Jackson’s teachings were as much a building block to the landscape of the temporary as anything else in America. He helped create an intellectual argument that, in its own right, helped other Americans defend and normalize the landscape of the temporary.

  TRAVELING DADS AND THE EXPATRIATE STYLE

  Business professionals of all types have pioneered the shift to flexibility, transforming temporary ties and relations into ordinary behavior. In the interests of global competition, they have accepted high degrees of “insecurity” and “ambiguity” (although they are paid good salaries for that acceptance).4 “In this culture, we must find the sources of stability in ourselves,” said Morris Schechtman, business consultant favored by many congressional Republicans, in his 1994 Working Without a Net. “Internal security nets are portable.”5 Rosabeth Kanter, consultant for Fortune 500 companies, has argued the same thing in her book World Class (1995). “Traditional values,” she said, “are eroding,” and we “must build new forms of security while embracing the emerging realities of flexibility, mobility, and change.”6

  By the mid-nineties, corporate managers were flying around the world more often, and more quickly, than ever before—here to sign a deal, there to play golf, here and there to convene a meeting, sign a deal, and play golf, all within a few days, sometimes on the same day.7 There were so many flying executives and other business people that airports and hotels were overflowing.8

  We might call many of these business people neo-expatriates, because they officially resided in their home country but were so often out of it as to be uncertain about where they were, or about what state or country they actually belonged to. (They were similar in this respect to the interstate truckers who moved the goods these men produced.) John Crompton, a snack-food executive with Pepsico in 1995, increased his air travel by 50 percent since the early nineties. E. V. Goings (good name), president of Tupperware in that same period, was not only versed in three languages, after months of language immersion, but had worked in Germany and Hong Kong. Barry Salzman, president of DoubleClick International, spent 75 percent of his time traveling in 1998, toting his requisite laptop to read his hundreds of e-mail messages daily and to help manage his global network of thirteen offices.9

  Michael Lorelli exemplifies the peripatetic executive of the age. A “traveling dad,” as he calls himself, he has gone from job to job, lived in place after place, and known years of jet lag, visiting over eighty countries. He helped run Playtex International, Clairol, Apple Computer, and Pepsico. As president of Pepsico’s Pizza Hut International, he logged 300,000 miles. In the mid-nineties he presided over Tambrands Americas in White Plains, New York, maker of Tampax. While at Tambrands, he lived with his wife and two daughters in Darien, Connecticut, a community Vance Packard memorialized in his 1972 book A Nation of Strangers as a new kind of transplant town, known for its big residences where business managers lived temporarily, on their climb up the corporate ladder, and from which they commuted daily to New York. In those days, Packard wrote, the only people who showed much interest in the town’s affairs were the “wives of the transient,” who joined parent-teacher groups, served on the town government, and fund-raised (although their activities were always limited by prospects of future transplants to other places). By the nineties, even this reserve had dried up, as many traveling moms had joined husbands in pursuit of corporate careers.

  In the fall of 1996, after Tambrands dissolved its Americas division to create a combined global operation, Lorelli, true to his destiny, pulled up “roots” and left Darien too, migrating to New Jersey to become president of a computer beeper-making business called Medicom.

  By his own account, Lorelli paid a price for his chronic traveling, although not a price that seemed to slow him down. “You are away for as many as three weeks at a time,” he admitted in 1996, shortly before moving to New Jersey, “then you come back and you’re a zombie because you’re exhausted.”10 So much time in the air, in fact, inspired him to write a children’s book—Traveling Again, Dad? which was profusely illustrated by Drew Struzan, a California artist well known for his posters for Steven Spielberg’s films E.T. and Indiana Jones. The cover showed both author and illustrator waving from the windows of a corporate jet in the liftoff mode. Both men—it said on the jacket cover—created the book because they “believe that passing along our values is the true purpose of parenthood.”11

  The book is odd. Narrated by an animal—the family’s hamster, Awesome—it seems, on first impression, like an apology from Lorelli to his wife and two young girls for leaving home so often. But it is really a sentimental gloss on the landscape of the temporary, amplified by Struzan’s Pollyannaish drawings and interspersed with snippets from family letters. It is unclear throughout—indeed, it is never stated—what “values” are being “passed on.” “I’m going to miss you, Dad,” says Awesome. “I wish you weren’t going away.” “Dad explained that being away from the family now and then was part of his job. Lots of moms and dads have to travel for work.” The girls are reassured: as Awesome points out, “the map on the refrigerator helps us to keep track of Dad’s travels.”

  Along with neo-expatriates like Lorelli, however, have come the real thing: business expatriates who have lived abroad, managing and creating investments, properties, and companies for extended periods. Years ago, most people thought of American expatriates as artists or various bohemians who fled the crass money culture of their country to pursue some “higher” goal. Most longed to become writers or artists; some died in Europe; still others, like critic Malcolm Cowley in the 1920s, returned home, burdened by guilt, to write memoirs begging for forgiveness for having left the country.12 Cowley called his book Exile’s Return.

  Since the mid-1980s, these literary types have been superseded by a different breed who have little interest in “higher culture” and seek no forgiveness. Instead of fleeing money, they have been bringing it to the world.13 Among them were young American investment bankers, real estate specialists, and techno-experts, who had invaded even Vietnam with their laptops and wallets, eager to make their first million. “We’re creating a city here,” Rachel Loeb from Kansas City, who sold skyscraper space to businesses eager to build in “new” Saigon, told a reporter, “and I’m selling it to the fund managers and CEOs of the world. I don’t know many twenty-three-year-olds who can say that.”14

  In a burst of euphoria in 1995, the Wall Street Journal called people like Loeb the “footloose soldiers” of “history’s mightiest cultural and commercial empire.”15 To some degree they resembled the peripatetic mining engineers, the Herbert Hoovers, of the turn of the century, but there were more of them, and they were much less animated by the need to return home to serve their country. Some were very “footloose” indeed, such as a clutch of American billionaires who notoriously moved abroad to escape the IRS.16 Ted Arison, the “If you could see me now!” owner of Carnival Cruise Lines, the world’s biggest such company, lived in Israel, a tax-free paradise for Americans. The Campbell Soup heir John Dorrance III acquired Irish citizenship. The Dart brothers, Ken and Robert, sons of Kenneth Dart, the billionaire founder of the biggest foam-cup company in the world, renounced their U.S. citizenship. One lived in London, the other in the Cayman Islands. Like Dorrance, they became Irish citizens.17

  The Darts were a sy
mptom of the bigger pattern, the movement of American firms abroad, which, in the form of subsidiaries or as direct foreign investment, had surpassed all other transnational business in the world.18 But what did it mean that so many highly trained men and women—sometimes the most talented of Americans as well as the most money-hungry—no longer seemed to care for the places they came from and had lived in? How would they be made accountable, and to whom? How would they be taxed, and by whom? And, if they could not be taxed, how would they keep any sense of place at all?19 Year by year, managers and executives who claimed flexibility as the mark of the most advanced human activity were absent from the country. “Place for me,” one internationally mobile specialist said in 1994, is not something nailed down in time or geography, it “is a marker of change, chance, of opportunity.”20

  BRIGADES OF TEMPORARIES

  Not only has management adopted absenteeism for itself, but it has imposed it on workers, skilled and unskilled, as well. Since 1980, new flexible labor reserves materialized, all configured to serve the interests of business, and all contributing to the further demise of the union movement. During World War II, union membership within the ranks of all nonagricultural workers had reached a record 35.5 percent, a figure that remained relatively stable into the 1960s. Following that decade, however, the movement stalled; by the seventies, it began a rapid decline. By 1995 only 16 percent of workers in the private sphere were in unions, and in 1998 the figure had dropped to 10 percent. The causes for this attrition were complex, but the most significant was the widespread reliance by business on cheap, flexible labor, a reliance that kept wages down, set worker against worker, and severely undermined worker solidarity.21

  The new flexible labor pools included native-born Americans, skilled and unskilled, who worked under contract for short periods of time, traveled anywhere to take up temporary employment and often lived hand-to-mouth. Legions of foreign migrant workers also belonged to these reserves, as did immigrants, legal and illegal, many recruited into the country by hundreds of American firms—from the giant new meatpacking and chicken-producing factories of the South and Midwest to the fast-food chains and garment sweatshops on both coasts. Thirty years ago many of these businesses were unionized and paid good wages; in the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of nonunionized immigrants have toiled under conditions that most Americans would regard as intolerable.22

  The last time management had this kind of control over labor was in the late nineteenth century, before the advent of unions and safeguards. It was at this time of great industrial growth that corporations, big and small, first produced “close to the market” (“just-in-time” may have been an American idea) and to create inexpensive labor pools that managers could draw on at will. “We hire men when we want them,” said an employer around 1900. “We have no permanent work force.”23 Business also blocked all immigration controls, to keep what historian Alexander Keyssar calls “brigades” of inexpensive workers “sufficiently large to permit the demand for labor to fluctuate widely and often.” “The presence of foreign-born workers enhanced the ability of employers to run their businesses … ‘close to the market’ ” and “to regard all workers as potential members of the reserve,” Keyssar writes.24 These reserves, immigrant and nonimmigrant, reached levels of 20 percent of the workforce; they were found in every major trade or industry, each with its own surplus of unemployed, available workers. Few belonged to the middle class, however, since professional employment, from teaching to law, provided job security.25

  Since 1980 we have returned to these earlier times but with big differences, not the least of which has been the rise of a giant temporary-help business that has systematized what in the late nineteenth century was a very messy activity.26 Temporary-help agencies (as well as outsourcing firms, which they resemble) are not employment agencies but profit-seeking firms that recruit, screen, and rent workers whose employment lasts only so long as the employers want it to last. These workers, moreover, always come cheap and get few of the benefits given full-time workers (health insurance, vacation pay, sick leave, pensions, etc.); together with contracted-out labor, part-timers, on-call workers, and the self-employed, they represent upwards of 30 percent of all American workers (the percentage is far higher in metropolitan New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and similar places).27

  Before 1980, when Americans thought of “temps” at all, they may have imagined contractors who “sold” secretaries or day laborers, foreign and native-born. Such temporaries still exist, of course, and in more abundance than ever, the result especially of congressional desire to meet the omnivorous labor demands of America’s corporate farmers.28 But three new things have happened. First, the business ballooned, with the numbers of temp firms soaring to unheard-of levels (from 800 in 1956, to 16,000 in 1993).29 By the late nineties, moreover, the temporary-help industry had radically consolidated, reflecting the merger mania rippling throughout the economy, and producing “one-stop shopping” able to satisfy any temporary-staffing necessity, according to the Wall Street Journal.30

  The second thing that happened was that the temp business sold skilled middle-class labor as well as cheap unskilled labor. It reached out, in other words, to cover such skilled professionals as lawyers, chemists, engineers, biologists, and accountants, to mention a few—the sort of workers Americans had rarely viewed as temporary.31 Corporations of all kinds have depended on temporary skilled professionals as a way of controlling costs and competing worldwide with other firms; so much has this been the case that in 1997 the United States was the biggest market for such temporary employment in the world, accounting for about 40 percent of the temp market.32

  This increase in the supply of professionals, moreover, included the recruitment of temporary skilled foreign workers, a practice ushered in after 1990 when Congress created a new visa category (H-1B). This law gave companies the right to employ skilled people cheaply from anywhere in the world on a temporary basis, so long as these institutions could prove that no Americans existed to perform these jobs.33 Notably pro-business, the law allowed firms to lay off Americans and replace them with foreign workers who almost always got permanent visas after employment. It demanded no written proof that firms had first looked for Americans, and it created no sure way of protecting the foreign workers from low wages and other abuses, since by law the government had to wait for aggrieved workers to file complaints (and H-IB foreign workers almost never did, out of fear of losing their jobs).34

  The new immigration law also spawned a near-vicious market in temporary foreign workers. By 1995 firms such as Syntel, Inc., in Troy, New York; Analytical Technologies, Inc., in Minneapolis; and Mastech, in Pittsburgh, had emerged to feed the appetite for such skilled labor. Founded ten years earlier by two Indian immigrants, Mastech proved the most predatory of companies in its quest for H-1B talent, selling its corporate customers H-1Bs in bulk. Its vulture recruiters “surfed the Internet, looking … for signs of distress [abroad], perhaps a currency collapse, or hostage event—something that [might] spur a software developer to forsake home for the suitcase-lugging life as a programmer for hire.”35

  A third thing happened to this industry: it generated chains that dealt with unskilled and skilled labor alike. For historical reasons that have not been studied well, Americans have shown remarkable aptitude for selling almost anything in volume through chains. In 1989, Glen Welstad, a forty-five-year-old businessman in Kent, Washington, founded Labor Ready, a temporary-labor chain selling manual work on a daily basis. Welstad, a graduate of the University of North Dakota, already had “chain store” experience: for years he was a franchisee of Hardee’s Hamburger Restaurants and officer of Body Toning, Inc., and other chains. He was so good at his business, in fact, that he retired at forty. But Welstad was soon restless and returned fired up to start another kind of chain. He dreamed of creating the “McDonald’s of temporary staffing for the manual labor market,” with identical “stores” everywhere in America.36

&n
bsp; Labor Ready hired unskilled workers, often immigrants who sold their labor on street corners (to the chagrin of many locals) to haul, lift, paint, and dig. Among the firm’s leading clients were the movers of the country’s new goods, the trucking companies, the warehouses, the big chains such as Home Depot and Bed Bath and Beyond. For wages paid by Labor Ready to the workers, the company got a fee from clients using the labor, covering wages plus profit; the workers, however, received none of the usual benefits paid to permanent employees. Labor Ready’s trademarks were its “dispatch halls” or “stores,” where workers gathered at 6 A.M. to be matched with their jobs (by managers who arrived at 5:30); its automated cash dispensers (because, as Welstad said, the workers preferred the “privacy” of cash); and its transport system (the company itself transported the workers to and from their sites). Labor Ready also boasted a software system, LabPro, that monitored, on an almost hourly basis, the success or failure of the various “stores.” Such surveillance, like the one used by trucking firms to track truckers, pressured managers, who sold on commission, to sell labor fast and efficiently.37

  The pressures paid off. In the early nineties, Labor Ready had only eight offices; by 1998, it was a publicly traded darling of Wall Street with more than 400 offices and revenues approaching half a billion dollars.38

  The systematic chain-selling of temp labor, however, touched skilled workers as well. Tom Buelter, for instance, of Calabasas, California, founded a firm, On Assignment, Inc., in the early nineties to sell chemists and biologists. Buelter’s strategy was to locate recent college graduates and customize them to employers short-term. By 1994 he owned forty-four branch offices and had placed thousands of “workers” into industrial labs around the country.39