HIGH-TECH AND THE ACADEMY
Global high-tech computer firms and universities exemplified best, perhaps, how far the temporary had penetrated into this skilled market. Consisting of a core group of managers plus a large community of “flexed” and “just-in-time” employees hired to carry out on-time projects, high-tech firms have long been wedded to temp agencies as “virtual human resources department[s]” for the “screening, testing, and training” of highly skilled labor.40 They also raked the world for young skilled foreign labor, oblivious of where their employees came from, and exploiting to the hilt the government’s 1990 immigration policy. Between 1992 and 1994 alone software companies like Intel, Netscape, 3M, and Microsoft scooped up nearly 110,000 H-1B workers.41
Voracious and pesty, high-tech companies lobbied again and again for an increase in the quota of such workers, on the grounds that the domestic supply could not meet the demand.42 But since America’s population was the third largest in the world, nearing 260 million by the mid-nineties (in 1999 closer to 275 million), and these firms cared little or nothing about national borders, the truth lay elsewhere than in the lack of domestic supply. “We want great flexibility,” said a 3M executive, William McClellan, in 1995. “We want the ability to bring our people in from Brussels or people in from Taiwan, to do the work we need to do.” “Because of globalization,” argued Motorola’s CEO, Richard Eagle, “we have to move people back and forth very quickly.” Immigration lawyer Paul Parsons, who worked for computer companies in Austin in the nineties, summed it up: “Companies are frustrated. They want to hire the best and the brightest. And they want to be able to move their key people in quickly, often temporarily.”43 From the managerial perspective, these best and brightest were the stars of a fluid firmament, exemplary workers in the way illegal immigrants (cheap, deferential, silent in the face of abuses, tolerant of high levels of mobility), models for American employees who might be “less willing to relocate” or more demanding of respect.44
Global high-tech firms, along with other global companies such as Proctor and Gamble and Ford Motor Company, have worked hard to change the basic logic of the country’s immigration policy, which historically offered a haven to the oppressed of the world while, at the same time, protecting American labor from unfair competition by foreigners. These approaches were dated, global firms have argued, especially the approach favoring the protection of American workers.45 Intel, Digital Equipment, Eastman Kodak, and others have insisted that such protection merely “subsidized labor” in a way similar to that of the protective tariffs that favored American goods over foreign. It belonged to the Old Time before the “globalization of the marketplace.” What was needed now was not a policy to protect American workers, to say nothing of creating a refuge for the oppressed of the world, but rather one to subsidize American businesses, to “reflect the realities of the contemporary global marketplace,” and to remove all the “stifling” obstacles to the “international movement of personnel.”46
For years, high-tech firms, indifferent to the nation and its borders, have urged Congress to ignore the interests of domestic workers. They have, in other words, encouraged Congress to act as a willing agent in the destruction of national identity on behalf of creating richer transnational companies with little commitment to the country. In 1998 they succeeded in getting both the Clinton administration and the Congress—especially the market-oriented Republican majority, who disregarded the House’s own report that “the shortage” of American workers had been grossly exaggerated and that companies like 3M, Motorola, and Xerox were even planning to fire thousands of workers—to raise the number of H-1B visas from 65,000 to 95,000 and to 115,000 annually for the years 1999 through 2002.47
Like other businesses headed by shrewd managers, universities, too, have turned to temporary and part-time instructors to teach students and run laboratories. Over the past fifteen years, at least, they have erected a two-tiered system that has closely followed the one that has arisen in business. The upper tier consists of a core of tenured faculty who get full health benefits and job security, plus such perquisites as paid sabbaticals and generous vacation time.48 The lower tier of this system, in the early seventies around 20 percent of faculty but by 1998 43 percent, contains a swelling corps of people variously called “gypsies,” “invisible faculty,” or “the migrant workers of the academy.”49 Many are drawn from seemingly unchanging numbers of native-born graduate students, while others are postdoctoral candidates, native-born and foreign, whose numbers doubled from 17,000 in 1975 to 35,500 in 1995 and who worked like faculty but got low pay and no job security.50 Close to 70 percent of all instructors at community colleges in 1997 were adjuncts or temporaries.51
The very existence of the upper tier depends on a beleaguered lower faculty. “Part-time faculty,” said a department chair in a major urban university, “are the protection for the university. The tenured faculty can’t be removed. The budget is fluctuating up and down. Therefore, the part-time faculty are the buffer. They take care of the budget surges and shortages.” Another has said that “we buy cheap labor and we get what we pay for.”52
Years ago, many Americans longed to join the academy, not only because of the intellectual adventure there but because it seemed to offer a world where spouses and children, as well as single people, misfits, and eccentrics, might get some sense of security and continuity, even after retirement. As Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, observed in 1962, “the university, as an institution” aims to give four things to faculty: “stability,” “security,” “continuity,” and a “sense of equity (they should not be suspicious that others are being treated better than they are).”53
By 1970 this culture, this world, had begun to disintegrate. What emerged in its place was a disorderly environment sometimes riven by feuds and fears, where tenure had ceased being a way to protect academic independence and had become instead a fortress in a storm and the property of an ever-shrinking few. Was a sense of place, to say nothing of loyalty to place, likely in this context, especially for the new brigade of temporaries?
URBAN AGGLOMERATIONS AND TEMPORARY HOMES
For many businesses at the frontlines of the global economy, then, the last decade and a half have been banner years, marked by a steady flow of abundant casual labor, skilled and unskilled, in nearly every sector of the American economy. Such conditions of labor and management have made American businesses the most competitive and predatory anywhere. But many problems have accompanied this development.
One serious problem connected with this new economic universe has been the birth of huge urban agglomerations whose very character has been determined by the growth of contingent labor pools and whose identity as places is the very placelessness that afflicts them. Metropolitan New York and Los Angeles are among such places; the culture and economy of both are shaped by the decline of an older manufacturing base and by the ubiquitous presence of a casualized workforce, including temporaries, part-timers, subcontractors, and so forth. The informal work economy, which operates generally underground or beyond convention and law, and involves mostly recent immigrant labor (illegal and legal, children and adults), has brought together masses of people from every point in the world, people whose only bond is their contingency. Many of these people, in turn, exist to serve the interests of “urban glamour zones” occupied by an elite (financial-service providers of all kinds, bankers, planners, advertising people, and so forth) which itself has become accustomed to temporariness and which has little attachment to America except as a launching pad for careerist dreams.54
It has been these two groups—an avaricious, flexible elite and a large pool of poor, flexible immigrants—who have created the informal economy of New York City (as well as of the other cities). Without such an economy, which elected officials and policymakers throughout the state have done much to condone and even to decriminalize (including acquiescing to illegal immigration), that city could not funct
ion. New York City’s own government spent $32.1 million in 1994, a record sum, on temporary workers, in an attempt to cut the public payroll.55
For free marketeers, such work conditions proved ideal because they exerted a strong “disciplinary effect on American workers” and kept wages down.56 But they also stirred up corrosive insecurity, and it was around regions such as this that one could nearly feel it—the raw vitality, the struggle of many people, the anxiety on the subways or the streets. Following a pattern set years ago by other immigrants, the new migrants, the labor pools, also tended to form neighborhoods from which many hoped to escape, leaving behind spaces to be filled by more, similar, migrants, thus perpetuating the cycle.57
Another outcome of the growing landscape of the temporary has been the rise of newer kinds of housing for the affluent as well as the poor.
Temporary housing, of course, has always transcended class but never more so than in the past few decades. It has come in the form of “trophy homes” for wealthy entertainers and sports stars who buy goliath houses one year, only to trade them in the next for something bigger or more eye-catching.58 Realtors have helped traveling dads, like CEO Michael Lorelli, find temporary housing, usually cookie-cutter colonial or French Renaissance mansions devoid of any personal touches introduced by occupants, homes which can be conveniently marketed any time the owners move on to their next job, state, or country.59 After 1980 an array of luxury master-planned communities also opened up in suburbs, with golf courses and swimming pools, courting millions of affluent Americans “who move a lot” and want “instant community.”60 Designers and architects, too, have “rethought the home” and its furniture—“collapsible, lightweight, high-end design,” “nothing heavy,” to satisfy the flexible style of “the new professionals, just out of college, changing jobs every couple of years, people who are on the move.”61
The lodging industry has also been busy serving the needs of mobile professionals and managers. Over the past ten years, American firms have built numerous chains of mid-level and economy hotels—from the merged Hospitality Franchises, Inc. (owner of Days Inn and Ramada Hotel), and Marriott International to the new “extended-stay hotels” such as Homestead Village, Wingate Hotels, and Extended Stay America. These chains have added thousands of new units to the world’s supply, not only in the United States but also throughout Europe and in such countries as India, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, and China.62 By the late nineties, businesspeople could travel almost anywhere and find reasonably priced hotels, comfortable places to hop into and out of, each one like the other, often with the same electronic tools (computers and voice mail), each reproducing the same air-conditioned, streamlined style dictated by their temporary nature.63
There are nests of these chains near every major airport and train terminal, around every conference center—temporary housing through which pass droves of flexible computer nerds, consultants on short-term assignments, global migrants, and high-level managers with their remembering machines.
These homes resemble the ones many professional Americans themselves live in when they are not traveling, utilitarian places to inhabit, leave, and recirculate. Far more than any other group of people anywhere, American businessmen (and most have been men) have been inclined to create a landscape of temporary housing because they themselves treat their own homes as temporary dwellings (despite their worship of home ownership). Years ago, many Americans did not think of their homes in this way, because such homes, especially farmhouses, embraced many things, from spiritual observance and cooking to childcare and apprenticeships. Such activities endowed the home with the power to “root people to the landscape,” to quote J. B. Jackson again. Many people loved their homes, because they truly lived in them.64 In modern times, the home—even as it has gotten obscenely bigger and families much smaller—has lost much of this character and, therefore, its capacity to connect people to place.65 Such a situation explains why it has become so easy for so many people to leave their homes behind (since so little of any substance happens in them); and it also helps explain why so many Americans—not Europeans, not Asians—have been so temperamentally well suited to building the world’s biggest hospitality empire.66
Temporary housing of all kinds, then, has been cropping up since the late 1970s, but because of its relative invisibility, most Americans think nothing of it. Other kinds of housing, however, for a different group of people, have not been so hidden from view. One can see them throughout the country but especially in the South (Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia) and the West and the Southwest (Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, and California). They dot highways and rural byways, forming agglomerations on a small scale, one might say. These mobile homes and trailer parks have often met the needs of poor and working-class Americans, many tied in some way to the demands of the casual labor market.
Mobile homes have long been a feature of this society, especially after 1960.67 In the 1960s and seventies, however, skilled people—mechanics, electricians, carpenters, engineers, even a few dentists and doctors—were the largest group of owners, followed in number by: military personnel and their families, who moved from base to base; retired people looking for security in contained enclaves; and people who vacationed with small (and sometimes long) travel trailers.68
In the early 1960s, novelist John Steinbeck journeyed across the country in a mobile home with his poodle dog, Charley, a trip that formed the basis for his book Travels With Charley. Somewhere in Maine, he encountered a young family living in a big air-conditioned aluminum mobile home, fitted with an “immaculate kitchen, walled in plastic tile, stainless-steel sinks and ovens and stoves flush with the wall.” He interviewed the young owner, a successful mechanic and welder and son of Italian immigrants. Steinbeck and his new friend talked of “roots” and of staying fixed in one place. But in a way that put him squarely in the mainstream of American culture, this man hated roots and fixity. He hated permanence and saw his mobile home as the best thing in the world.
“My father came from Italy,” he told Steinbeck. “He grew up in Tuscany in a house where his family had lived maybe a thousand years. That’s roots for you, no running water, no toilet, and they cooked with charcoal or vine clippings.” “Fact is, he cut his roots and came to America.” Steinbeck asked if he missed “permanence.” “Who’s got permanence?” he responded. “You got roots you sit and starve. You take the pioneers in the history books. They were movers. Take up land, sell it, move on.” Steinbeck seemed persuaded. “Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need,” he said. Yet a few pages later, he complained about the weakening of “the poetry of place” or of local differences, which he blamed on the impact of “radio and television speech,” as “standardized” as “white bread.” “I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by [this]. For with local accent will disappear local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go.… Localness is not gone but it is going.”69
Since Steinbeck’s day, the main occupants of trailer parks have not been prospering welders or professionals but blue-collar Americans with a median income (in 1991) of $19,500.70 The rise in the number of unskilled working-class owners after 1980, in fact, had transformed mobile homes into the fastest-growing sector of the housing market; by 1991, in nineteen states, at least one home in every ten was a mobile home, most bought by the working poor.71 Elderly Americans, of course, still filled the trailer parks in Florida and elsewhere, often living in communities of considerable luxury and security; upscale recreational vehicles also remained popular for both the Wall Street and Hollywood rich.72 But most of the trailer folk were poor; and the homes they owned were, of course, not very mobile at all but fixed in place. They did suit, however, the needs of the mobile people in them, people ready to change homes at a moment’s notice.
J. B. Jackson, in his 1994 book A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, said that trailers also resembled automobiles, imperson
al and “easy to trade and sell.” “When a better job becomes available somewhere else, the family can at least consider the wisdom of selling, and of finding similar accommodations wherever they go.”73 Jackson also noted what he thought were the many blessings of the trailer parks: the low costs, the ease of financing and maintenance, the convenience and comfort, and the fact that trailer living “brings with it no new responsibilities, no change or expansion in the traditional routine.”74
But Jackson went further than this in an effort, partly, to counter those critics with grimmer, often more condescending thoughts about “trailer trash.” He claimed that many of the new trailer parks (he focused particularly on parks in New Mexico) actually represented new kinds of blue-collar “villages” that fostered openness and hospitality among people. They encouraged people to “go outside” rather than to stay inside and to rely on one another in the public square for pleasure and comfort. Such villages, Jackson argued, compared favorably with middle-class dwellings, which were divided into discrete spaces to ensure isolation, privacy, and limited interaction with neighbors. Mobile homes, on the other hand, were too confining to keep their owners holed up inside for very long. Vernacular rather than planned spaces, they were products of everyday uses, and they brought people together into something of an organic community, into a “super-family,” or an “us,” carved out of what Jackson called elsewhere “the landscape of the temporary.”
J. B. JACKSON’S DOUBLE VISION
John Brinckerhoff Jackson was perhaps the first American thinker to devote an entire intellectual career to the exploration of “the landscape of the temporary.” Almost single-handedly, in his books, through his magazine Landscape, and in his college courses at Harvard and Berkeley, he taught his students to “see” landscapes not as pretty pictures but as “a system of man-made surfaces on the surface of the earth.”75 He also knew better than anyone how highways and roads defined America. He made a ritual of ending his college course “The History of the American Cultural Landscape” (fondly known by his students as “Gas Stations”) with an assessment of the superhighway.
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