Temporary Duty

Wherein Our Heroine Goes off on a Rant.

Years ago, I worked for Honeywell as a very long-term temp. Honeywell had an "internship" program which worked like this: employee A goes on leave for a significant period of time (maternity, illness, etc.). A's job is then filled temporarily by someone from the lower ranks (call them B) as a sort of cross-training, employee skills improvement "intern." B's job is filled by C... and you get the picture. Within a few moves, the bottom rung is reached and they contract that job out to a temp. In the early nineties, I was that temp for someone in the Public Relations department.

I was trained by my predecessor - she initially took a shine to me. I think she was sort of proud of me in a protege-mentor sort of way. I remember her face and her long, air-brushed nails, but I don't remember her name. This is a good thing, because I don't want to. She left me with a cubicle filled with stacks of unfinished projects, explaining that she didn't have time to do them and didn't expect me to have time either. She answered nearly every request with an initial "no," a negotiating position it is hard to combat for most people. Our boss, Anne, often didn't have the stomach to fight with her. They had a distant, chilly relationship. I inherited that along with the unfinished projects.

After a while, when I got acclimated to the daily routines, I started to nibble away at those projects. I filed boxes of photographs, created archive folders for old press releases, and slowly started to be able to see more than one square foot of desk space. I also started getting along with my boss, who eventually thawed enough to see what I was doing and that I was doing it cheerfully. I am still not sure whether the efficiency or the camaraderie were more offensive to my predecessor. She started showing up at my cubicle, startling me by barking out questions that inevitably started with: "What have you done with my-" To this day, I cannot stand to have an office where my back is to the door. The cubicle was configured this way, and it made her sneak attacks all the more effective. There were also a few catty rumor-campaigns which died a swift death, and she occasionally felt it necessary to tell me off for some imagined misdeed. It wasn't fun, but in the long run it wasn't damaging either.

Finally, my year was up and my predecessor reclaimed her old job. I was re-contracted here and there, and finally went off to law school, leaving the situation behind, but not the lessons I had learned. First and foremost was that I had learned to be rather militant about what I consider to be the exploitation of temp workers. About half of the admin staff at Honeywell was temporary when I worked there. We lived hand to mouth, earned our pay week to week and had no health insurance unless we were married to someone who had it. A sick day meant you didn't get paid, and one week's vacation came only after a year's work. Meanwhile my predecessor, the one who was so fond of the word "no," spent valuable time pursuing petty harassment and who couldn't clear her backlog, got better pay and full benefits. I had inadvertently made her look bad, but she was still the one who was employed and I was not.

There is sometimes a fine line between "unfair" and "stupid." Sometimes the circles overlap. This was an overlap case which I have seen happen again and again. I have worked at places which used temps in this way - year in and year out, all in service of the bottom line. It is easier for top managers to cut regular support staff, fill their places with temps, and ignore the hidden cost of training and retraining a continuous stream of new faces and the frustration of highly-paid workers who end up expensively doing their own admin work because it's just faster and easier than asking the new person who doesn't even know where the restroom is.

Employee loyalty may be expensive, but it's worth every penny.

Posted: Friday - April 09, 2004 at 08:33 AM | |