The Permatemps Contretemps

WashTech is now moving more formally on other fronts, starting with wages. Most temp agencies refuse to disclose to temps how much money they charge for a temp worker's labor. "Many of these agencies are just parasites," says Blain. "They hire whomever Microsoft tells them to put on their payroll. Then they process their paychecks, and that's it. They're just glorified money launderers." WashTech and its members believe that, like lawyers and accountants who work for a firm, temp workers should be told by their agencies the rates at which their services are billed out. The group was influential in drafting a bill in Washington's state legislature that would force agencies to disclose their markups.

But for all of its activity and public-relations successes, WashTech has found the actual organizing of new members slow going. By May 2000, the union had signed up only about 260 members -- far short of the 1,500 that it needs to be self-sustaining at its current staffing levels. As of last December, Microsoft had 18,525 full-time employees working in the Puget Sound area near Seattle and had between 5,000 and 5,500 other employees working as temporary workers in that same region. WashTech's own surveys suggest that nearly 60% of those temps would prefer to have a full-time job with the company -- an estimate that suggests that there are ample numbers of temps for the union to sign up.

Why, then, has it been so hard to get temps to join? Courtney points to a number of reasons. A lot of temps are scared to join, he says, and they're caught in a catch-22: Those who are most unhappy tend to be temps who want full-time jobs but can't get them, and those same temps are least likely to make waves and jeopardize their chances of getting those full-time jobs. Meanwhile, true temps are generally not joiners by nature. "They have a strong sense of individual spirit, and none of them has ever encountered an organization like ours," Courtney says. "The word 'union' comes with a certain amount of baggage for white-collar workers in general, and for individualist workers, in particular. So we try to get people interested in the issues that we're working on without using that term to describe what we do."

Perhaps the biggest challenge that WashTech's organizers face comes from the transient nature of many free agents. Over the past two years, 400 people have joined WashTech at one time or another but then have left town or have dropped out of touch. "For the past two generations, unions have appealed to people who would hold the same job for 30 years," Courtney says. "The power of a union contract has come from being able to go back to the bargaining table over and over again to improve it."

In fact, despite Courtney's arguments to the contrary, "love it or leave it" does describe the way that many temps approach their work. Courtney remains confident, however, and so far his CWA sponsors have shown no sign of withdrawing their support, even though they'll likely have to cover the shortfall in WashTech's budget for the foreseeable future. "For the CWA to remain viable in the 21st century, it needs to have a strong presence among information-technology workers, and it's looking for us to lead the way," Courtney says. "As long as we're making changes at companies like Microsoft, building support for our organization, and translating that support into new members, they'll want to be a part of that. Their support is not based upon a membership quota."

Peg Cheirrett: The Permatemps Agent

For the owners of many Seattle-area temp agencies, Microsoft's decade-long permatemp experiment has been extremely good for business. For Peg Cheirrett, who has spent the past 15 years running WASSER Inc., an agency for technical writers, it has been just plain extreme. First she rode to the top of the business, filling Microsoft's demands for employees. Then she rode out of the business, accepting a lucrative offer from a company that wanted to buy her firm. "Microsoft made WASSER's growth feasible," Cheirrett says. "If we had been in Kansas, this would be a very different company."

According to Cheirrett, 51, the true free agents who worked through WASSER enjoyed their work at Microsoft but often felt conflicted. "I recall one conversation with someone who was particularly mistrustful of me," she says. "The whole reason that he had gone independent in the first place was because he felt that agencies were exploitative and that they didn't give anything back to workers. Working through an agency in order to do work for Microsoft, to him, was a loss of control, a loss of prestige."

The evolution of the permatemp, Cheirrett says, was largely a matter of inertia. "It just seemed to happen to some people," she says. "There was one person who worked for me at Microsoft for six years, and at some point during the beginning of year number three, he began to notice that the whole thing was just going by itself. Once we put workers like him into the Microsoft system, those workers would find more projects there on their own and would stay on."