Corporate subcontracting creates new occupational segregation in benefits

Evidence

Increasingly, corporations avoid hiring full-time direct workers, and instead hire longor short-term subcontractors. It’s a win for the corporation, which gets the labor without having to provide the guaranteed salary or benefits that full-time employees receive. However, the practice is creating a new form of occupational segregation, where white workers are more likely to have direct jobs, and nonwhite workers are more likely to have contract jobs. A 2016 report on subcontracting and diversity in Silicon Valley revealed that while black and Latino workers made up 10 percent of direct-hire employees, they constituted 26 percent of white-collar contract hires and 58 percent of blue-collar contract hires. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 371

Categorization

• XREF: Contract-versus-direct segregation parallels the ‘gig economy’ claims in contemporary labor reporting and echoes the temporary-vs-permanent distinction in A Midwife’s Tale’s indentured labor treatment. — connects to: Corporate benefit dependency converts workers into watchdogs of profitability — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 260