Recent sweeping changes in staffing and personnel management have evoked
passionate responses such as these. Microsoft Corporation’s “permatemps”
symbolized the rough-and-tumble private sector employment landscape, and the
Microsoft employees’ lawsuit highlighted employer abuses of contingent work
arrangements. Similar trends in government have provoked alarm, as the above
quotes demonstrate. Who are these people in alternative working arrangements? Are
they victims of a Darwinian labor market, as Representative McCloskey suggests?
