34. For these features of the law, see the report of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, “Workforce Improvement and Protection Act of 1998,” 105–657, which accompanied H.R. 3736, July 29, 1998, pp. 10–11, 22.
35. “Forget the Huddled Masses: Send Nerds,” BusinessWeek, July 21, 1997, 110–16.
36. Phone interview with Labor Ready staff, April 17, 1998; Labor Ready Annual Report 1996, courtesy Labor Ready, Tacoma, Washington, pp. 8–9; Wall Street Corporate Reporter, June 23–29, 1997, 1 (courtesy Labor Ready); and New Tribune (internet journal), February 23, 1997, 1 (courtesy Labor Ready).
37. Quoted in Wall Street Corporate Reporter, June 23–29, 1997, 1.
38. Phone interview with Labor Ready staff, April 15, 1998; “Company Provides Temporary Jobs to Blue-collar Workers,” Putnam Reporter Dispatch, March 28, 1998, 5B; “Temp Firm Earns Niche in Manual Labor,” Chicago Tribune, March 13, 1998; Charles Keenan, “Temp Agency Uses Diebold to Pay Daily in Cash,” American Banker, March 3, 1998; and Julie Tamaki, “Hardware Chain Adds a Depot for Hiring Laborers,” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1997.
39. “Temp Tycoon Steers Jobseekers,” WSJ, October 4, 1994, A19.
40. On high-tech “permatemps,” see NYT, March 30, 1998, B1; and Mitchell Fromstein (CEO of Manpower), quoted in Business Week, June 10, 1996, 8. By the mid-nineties, moreover, upwards of 230 smaller temp firms had been created (well above the figure of forty in 1990) to serve these specialized markets, and sometimes making multimillion-dollar profits. See “A Temporary Force to Be Reckoned With,” NYT, May 20, 1996, D1. On Silicon Valley as prototype for other workplaces, see “Full Time, Part Time, Temp—All See the Job in a Different Light,” WSJ, March 18, 1997, A1, A10; and, for a subsequent development, see “Coopers and Lybrand Tackles Turnover By Letting Its Workers Have a Life,” WSJ, September 19, 1997, R4: “About 900 of the [this] firm’s 17,000 US employees … now work part time, telecommute, or have other flexible schedules. Almost none did so six years ago.”
41. Figures from “H-1B Program—Survey Data—1992–94” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor); and “A U.S. Recruiter Goes Far Afield to Bring in High-Tech Workers,” WSJ, January 8, 1998, 1.
42. Even BusinessWeek found serious fault with this position. See “Is There a Technie Shortage?,” BusinessWeek, June 29, 1998.
43. Testimony before the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, “Employment-Based Immigration Consultation,” Washington, D.C., February 23, 1995, pp. 11–20; also January 18, 1995, p. 57 (for Motorola), and p. 66 (for 3M).
44. These corporate quotes come from Charles Keely, “Globalization and Human Resource Management: Nonimmigrant Visa Strategies and Behavior of U.S. Firms,” 53. This report, heavily biased in favor of globalized firms, quotes abundantly from the firms themselves; it makes clear that they want, above all, “labor flexibility,” which foreigners (not Americans) give them. “The problem would seem to be [for Americans] willingness to relocate and perhaps move into a new work environment.” Keely is professor of international migration at Georgetown University.
45. See Keely, “Globalization and Human Resource Management,” which speaks for seven major global firms but also pretends to represent the views of the majority of such firms. Among Keely’s other listed companies are Deloitte and Touche, Ford, Procter and Gamble, and Eastman Chemical. All quotes in this discussion, once again, come from this seventy-five-page report.
46. Ibid., p. 63.
47. The report of the House Committee on the Judiciary, “Workforce Improvement and Protection Act of 1998,” pp. 10–11, 17–22. See also Chronicle of Higher Education, August 7, 1998, May 29, 1998, A33; “High-Tech Companies to Ask Congress for Easier Immigration for Workers,” WSJ, February 24, 1998, A2; and NYT, October 16, 1998, p. A25.
48. Richard Chait, “Thawing the Cold War over Tenure,” Adjunct Advocate, January–February 1998, 18; and Anne Matthews, Bright College Years: Inside the Campus Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), pp 177–91.
49. Some analysts put the figure even higher, at more than 50 percent (a figure that includes part-timers, temporary full-timers, and teaching and research assistants). If one included graduate assistants, the figure was possibly this high (phone interview with Ernest Benjamin, director of research, American Association of University Professors, July 21, 1998). See “For Some Adjunct Faculty Members, the Tenure Track Holds Little Appeal,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 24, 1998, A9; “Contracts Replace the Tenure Track for a Growing Number of Professors,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 1998, A12; “Professors Are Working Part Time, and More Teach at 2-Year Colleges,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 13, 1998, A14. See also, for changes over time, Tony Horowitz, “Young Professors Find Life in Academia Isn’t What It Used to Be,” WSJ, February 15, 1994, 1; Seth Adams, “Part-Time College Teaching Rises,” NYT, January 1, 1995, A17; Philip Altbach, “The Pros and Cons of Hiring ‘Taxi-cab’ Professors,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 1995, B3; and Mary Elizabeth Perry, “The Invisible Majority: Myths, Realities, and a Call to Action,” Perspectives (American Historical Association newsletter), May–June 1995, 33:5, 9–11; and P. D. Lesko, interview with Kali Tal, Adjunct Advocate (Nov./Dec. 1997), 17. On wage disparities, see P. D. Lesko, “What Scholarly Associations Should Do to Stop the Exploitation of Adjuncts,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15, 1995, B3.
50. On the number of post-docs, see Chronicle of Higher Education, August 7, 1998, A60, and David North, Soothing the Establishment (New York: University Press of America, 1995), p. 98.
51. On community colleges, see Patricia M. Callan, “America’s Public Community Colleges,” Daedalus (Fall 1997) 126:4, 98.
52. Quoted in Judith Gappa and David W. Leslie, The Invisible Faculty: Improving the Status of Part-timers in Higher Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993), pp. 133. On recent attempts to organize on behalf of better conditions for adjuncts and temporaries, see, “Faculty Unions Move to Organize Growing Ranks of Part-Time Professors,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27, 1998, A12–13.
53. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963, 1982), p. 95.
54. The term “urban glamour zone” belongs to Saskia Sassen, who, more than any current urbanist, has stressed the formation of these two groups (the new immigrants and the new international elite) as they relate to one another. See her Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: The New Press, 1998), especially pp. xix–xxxvi. There is a huge literature on the informal economy, but on its spread and significance recently, in New York, see Louis Winnick, New People in Old Neighborhoods (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), pp. 123–71; and Peter Kwong, The New Chinatown (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997, rev. ed.), esp. chap. 10, “Unwelcome Newcomers: Chinatown in the 1990s,” pp. 174–205; and Roger Sanjek, The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), especially chapter 6, pp. 119–40.
55. New York Post, March 6, 1995, 2. In 1992, moreover, Governor Mario Cuomo’s office published a handbook for immigrants, titled Getting Started, which includes an introduction by the governor (New York State, Office of the Governor, 1992). The handbook explained to “undocumented aliens” how they might get access to public housing, to schools and higher education, and to jobs; and it provided extensive information on how to protest discrimination.
On decriminalizing the informal economy, see the 1994 testimony on New York City’s labor markets before the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform by Emmanuel Tobier, professor at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at NYU and a prominent city government adviser; Tobier told the commission that because “the workplace [is] changing tremendously,” “you really have to decriminalize the underground economy” (November 3, 1994, typescript, p. 114). Another important shaper of New York City’s policy has been the Regional Planning Association, which advised, in its third regional plan, that New York
City “legalize activities that do not threaten health and safety; such as small, home-based businesses in areas zoned for residential use”; see Tony Hiss, Region at Risk (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996), p. 192.
56. Kwong, The New Chinatown, p. 190.
57. On the implications of such cycles for place (or locality), see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 193. For an upbeat version of the pattern itself, see Winnick, New People in Old Neighborhoods, pp. 123–91.
58. “Home Run Athletes Build Mansions,” WSJ, December 20, 1996, B14.
59. Drawbacks, of course, have always existed for this kind of temporary housing, never more so than today; such recyclable houses demand that owners not decorate, rebuild, or modify to suit their special tastes. As relocation consultant Tom Peiffer recently noted, “building [or occupying] a house too closely tailored to your personality or needs could make for a difficult sale, especially if it is out of sync with the rest of the neighborhoods.” See “Executive Relocations—and Hassles—Increase,” WSJ, April 5, 1996, B10.
60. “The Lure of Planned Suburbs,” WSJ, October 7, 1998, p. B1.
61. “Young Americans Triumph in Paris,” NYT, January 23, 1997, C1.
62. On “over-building blues,” see WSJ, May 14, 1998, A2; on expansion of “extended stay hotels” and “temporary home hotels” over the past six years, see “Building a Brand,” Hotel and Motel Management, April 20, 1998.
63. Limited-service budget hotels/motels have been the “fastest-growing sector of the lodging industry with the number of rooms rising 78% since 1980” (Time, July 15, 1986, 45). On Studio Plus, see WSJ, January 24, 1996, B1; “Room Service à l’Américain,” NYT, October 3, 1997, D1; “Midlevel Hotels Look Abroad,” NYT, September 28, 1995, D1; “Marriott to Buy Renaissance Hotel Group,” WSJ, February 19, 1997, A3; “Marriott to Provide Long-Term Guests a New Economy-Priced Option,” WSJ, February 13, 1996, B7; “No Room in the Inn,” WSJ, December 13, 1996, B17; “Why Business Travel Is Such Hard Work,” WSJ, December 30, 1996, B1; “Pace of Business Travel Abroad Is Beyond Breakneck,” WSJ, May 31, 1996, B1; “Soon, Hotels Only a Boss Could Love,” WSJ, February 2, 1996, B7; and “High-Tech Hotels Try Homier Touches,” WSJ, March 29, 1996, B1.
64. See J. B. Jackson, 1952 and 1956 essays in Landscape in Sight, pp. 333–39.
65. For many, the dream of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the late-nineteenth-century American feminist, has been realized—the emptying of the home of all those matters that inhibit the individual freedom and flexibility of both sexes. On the spread of the goliath suburban homes, see “Suburbs’ Mass-Market Mansions,” NYT, March 18, 1998, B1.
66. On the current European efforts to copy American “chain” hotel style and building, at the cost of abandoning older, more place-connected, traditions, see “Room Service à l’Américain,” NYT, October 3, 1997, D1, D4.
67. Dan Mercer, “The Market for Mobile Homes,” Housing Economics, January 1995, 15.
68. Virginia Held, “Home Is Where You Park It,” The Reporter, February 18, 1960, quoted in George S. Pierson, The Moving American (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), pp. 113–14; and Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, p. 97.
69. Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, pp. 95–106.
70. Dan Mercer, “The Market for Mobile Homes,” Housing Economics, January 1995, 17.
71. Michael J. Ybarra, “Real Estate: Mobile Homes Zip Past Sales of Houses,” WSJ, August 29, 1994, B1; U.S. Department of Commerce, “Mobile Homes,” Bureau of Census statistical brief, May 1994; Mercer, “The Market for Mobile Homes,” 17, 1; and phone interview with Robert Bonnette, author of Department of Commerce’s “Mobile Homes,” July 20, 1995.
72. See “Mobile Mansions Offer RV Market a Lift,” WSJ, January 8, 1998, B2; and “Six Days in a Rolling Home,” BusinessWeek, April 27, 1998, E2–4.
73. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 62.
74. Ibid., pp. 60–62.
75. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 156.
76. Jackson, A Sense of Place, p. 167.
77. Quoted in D. W. Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 232–33.
78. Jackson, Landscape in Sight, pp. 201–5.
79. Compare with Foucault’s “limit-experiences” (see James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993], pp. 30–35, 273–75).
80. Quoted in Meinig, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, p. 94.
81. Jackson, Landscape in Sight, pp. 175–82.
82. Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, p. 10; see also Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape for similar comments, pp. 155–56.
83. Quoted in Meinig, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, p. 222.
84. Ibid.
85. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 125–26.
86. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, pp. 100–101.
87. Jackson, Landscapes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), pp. 152, 160.
88. Ibid., p. 154.
89. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, pp. 13–15.
90. Jackson, Landscapes, p. 158.
91. Ibid., 158; Discovering the Vernacular Landscapes, pp. 110–12, 151–52.
92. Ibid., pp. 133–35.
93. Ibid., pp. 135–37.
94. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins, pp. 16–17.
95. Ibid., pp. 16–17.
96. For a different sense of what peasant villages were like, see Richard Critchfield, The Villagers (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), pp. 18–39.
97. James Brooke, “Cry of Wealthy in Vail: Not in Our Playground,” NYT, November 5, 1998, A-20; Joseph Pereira, “Low-Cost Trailer Parks Are Shutting Down, Stranding the Poor,” WSJ, November 15, 1995, 1; Michael Shear, “Trailer Park in Transit,” Washington Post, February 10, 1994.
3.“A WONDERFUL SENSE OF PLACE”:
TOURISM AND GAMBLING TO THE RESCUE
1. White House Conference on Travel and Tourism, at the Sheraton Washington Hotel (Washington, D.C.), October 28–30, 1995.
2. Author’s visit, August 19–20, 1995; Meredith L. Oakley, On the Make: The Rise of Bill Clinton (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1994), pp. 26–27; Virginia Kelley, Leading with My Heart (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), pp. 72–77, 91, 107–8.
3. Speech by Greg Farmer, White House Conference on Travel and Tourism, October 29, 1995.
4. “The White House Conference on Travel and Tourism,” advertising supplement, Washington Post, October 30, 1995, C1. On Brown’s years living in the Hotel Theresa, see Tracey L. Brown, The Life and Times of Ron Brown (New York: William Morrow, 1998), pp. 40–46.
5. On tourism workforce and overall tourism growth, see “Tourism’s Role Rises, Creating Some Risks,” Wall Street Journal (hereafter WSJ), October 7, 1996, 1; and special supplement, “Travel and Tourism,” The Economist, January 10, 1998, 1–16. For histories of tourism, see Daniel Boorstin, The Image (New York: Vintage, 1992); John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 1–19; Neil Harris, “Urban Tourism and the Commercial City,” in William Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), pp. 66–83; and James Gilbert, “Imagining the City,” in James Gilbert, et al., eds., The Mythmaking Frame of Mind (Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth Publishing, 1992), pp. 135–55.
6. Quoted in “Regional Marketing Effort Hunts the Tourist Dollar,” Putnam Reporter Dispatch, May 3, 1997, 1. By summer 1997 this switch in New York to tourism as the new “economic development tool” climaxed with the influx of nearly $150 million from the federal government to help exploit the “rich” tourist potential throughout the state. “Once [towns and cities]
move out of manufacturing, what do they do?” asked Andrew Cuomo, secretary of HUD and mastermind of the project. “The answer for the nation has been tourism” (New York Times [hereafter NYT], August 15, 1997, B4).
7. “Expelled in 1877, Indian Tribe Is Now Wanted as a Resource,” NYT, July 22, 1996; James Brooke, “Boom Times Hit Utah, and Sticker Shock Follows,” NYT, January 31, 1996, A10; “Impact of Travel and Tourism on Arizona,” preliminary estimates, USTTA and the U.S. Travel Data Center, Travel Industry Association, Washington, D.C., March 1995. On the nineteenth-century treatment of this tribe, see Angie Debo, A History of the Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), pp. 261–64; and Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), pp. 107–8.
8. Peter Nabokov, ed., Native American Testimony (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 387.
9. Indian Country Today, December 16–23, 1996, A7; on international tourists, see “Culture Camp Attracts Many International Tourists,” Indian Country Today, 1996 Tourism and Gaming Edition, Summer 1996, 3–4; and “At One with Indians: Tribes of Foreigners Visit Reservations,” WSJ, August 6, 1996, 1.
10. Arthur Rubenstein, My Young Years (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), p. 143; and George W. Herald and Edward D. Radin, The Big Wheel: Monte Carlo’s Opulent Century (New York: William Morrow, 1963). For other gambling histories, see Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); George Sternlieb and James W. Hughes, The Atlantic Gamble (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); David Johnston, Temples of Chance (New York: Doubleday, 1992); John M. Findlay, People of Chance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Robert Goodman, The Luck Business (New York: Free Press, 1995).
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