This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: You've heard of gig workers, freelancers and temporary employees. But do you know about marginal workers?
Accounting for about one in six U.S. jobs, it's a huge category of people who are going nowhere fast in the workplace—and don't really have much say about that. "Marginal workers are employees who have no career prospects at their organizations," says MIT professor emeritus Paul Osterman, author of a new book on the subject. "They are employees of the organizations for which they work, but the organizations do not intend to keep them, and these workers are much less attached to any career ladder." As such, marginal workers are part of a larger trend in U.S. employment.
According to Osterman's analysis, 35% of U.S. workers are either marginal employees, freelancers, contractors or gig employees finding work on online platforms like rideshare services. "That's a big number," says Osterman, who is the Nanyang Technological University Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also a professor emeritus of work and organization studies. "That's over 55 million people in the American workforce." Osterman scrutinizes this employment landscape in his new book, "Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment," published this month by Harvard University Press.
In it, he examines the different categories of "disposable" workers in the U.S. while making the case that they are all part of a still-growing movement by firms to control labor costs, leaving many workers in precarious positions. "I wanted to present a unified way of thinking about these trends," Osterman says. Osterman is a longtime labor economist and author of several previous books whose work has often focused on job quality and labor-market fairness.
He was motivated to write "Disposable Workers," he says, because marginal workers have been significantly overlooked. Indeed, the category and term "marginal workers" come from Osterman. In researching the book, Osterman conducted an original survey of more than 6,000 workers, which helped shed light on the concept of marginal workers.
They can be found in a range of professions: staff attorneys at a law firm, adjunct faculty and many kinds of part-time employees with few opportunities for advancement. Overall, Osterman finds that about 17% of U.S. employees are marginal workers. Roughly 12% are contract workers, who are often employed by staffing agencies but then assigned to work at varying locations.
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