But then those permanent, full-time employees were expensive, and temps were comparatively cheap. There could be beauty in their contingency; you didn’t have to pay them benefits or overtime, and their numbers could be quietly shed in a downturn without announcing embarrassing layoffs. Eventually, “rather than protecting the core workers, Manpower enabled them to be fired.”

Hyman dates the beginning of this shift to the late 1960s, a time of stagnating profits. Cutting costs was easier than increasing revenues, and executives chose accordingly. Outsourcing certain functions to temporary or contract workers is now so commonplace it almost seems like part of the natural order, but back then, Hyman says, it was strange enough that it had to be learned.

For skittish executives, McKinsey consultants were there to help. Not only could consultants shoulder the blame when a corporation announced plans to restructure, but they also brought with them a worldview shaped by their own experiences as McKinsey “associates,” subject to the up-or-out policy of an “unforgiving meritocracy.”

As a former McKinsey consultant himself, Hyman likens associates to highly paid temps. They were indoctrinated to believe that “insecurity” was a goad for “excellence.” “A brutal lifestyle became a filter for becoming a successful consultant,” he writes, recalling colleagues who sacrificed their marriages and family lives in the process. “The people who reorganized corporations, by this filter, had little respect for stability.”

“Temp” also includes sections about American immigration law, towel-folding robots and undocumented women in Silicon Valley assembling circuitboards with their fingernails. Hyman is a lucid stylist who usually manages to write his way through the deluge, but sometimes the information can feel like too much all at once.

His ending, about the gig economy, is weirdly upbeat. He believes that it’s still possible for work to be rewarding — maybe even more possible, now that apps and online platforms offer the promise of cutting out corporate bosses and rent-seeking middlemen (leaving in place a few rent-seeking technocapitalist billionaires, of course). Individuals can sell their labor directly to one another. The only thing we need to do is to offer them the support they need — he cites health insurance and a basic income — because “a minimum safety net enables maximum risk taking.”

This sounds pretty fanciful, coming precisely at a time when Republicans in Congress seem determined to cut whatever threads of the safety net are left. I prefer Hyman when he gets out of wonk-mode and tells us what is really at stake: “The point is not to be better robots than robots, but to have more human work than our ancestors — creative, caring, curious.” This might sound fanciful too, but at least it’s an attempt to understand what work is and what it can be. Here, finally, is a book that encourages us to imagine a future that is inclusive and humane rather than sentimentalize a past that never truly was.