The Revanchist Mayor’s Brave New World of Temporary Work

In Larry O’Brien’s surprising come from nowhere victory in last year’s election, the local media hyped up Larry O as a high-tech entrepreneur. His intimate knowledge of the “f to f” of Ottawa’s Silicone Valley North were promoted as attributes that would give the Mayor the innovative business know-how to promote and maintain Ottawa as a choice destination in the increasing competition between global cities for high-tech workers and investment. His entrepreneurial expertise was simply taken as a stroke of genius. Surprisingly no one asked the simple question: Just how did Larry O’Brien make his millions?

Now to recall the previous post, O’Brien major success was building Calian Technology, yet, what is often overlooked is that Calian’s largest division, BTS, is a staff placement agency, with core functions of recruiting and workforce management. BTS, Calian’s website tells us, “offers temporary help, staffing and outsourcing services in the NCR.” In Orwellian double-speak, BTS “augments customer workforces with flexible short and long term placements of individuals and teams.” In other words, Larry O’s Calian Tech. is a staff placement agency primarily supplying temporary and contract workers. This kind of “innovative” staffing solution temporizes previously regularized work. Firms such as Larry O’s BTS make it easier for the employers to distance themselves from their workers. BTS “employs” the workers under contract with the place where they actually work, thus alleviating the “real” employer from having to respect labour contracts, paying benefits and from providing sustainable jobs and careers. In short, BTS makes it easier for firms (including the feds) to hire and fire employees at will and to pay lower wages. Meanwhile BTS takes a cut of the employees salary. High-tech indeed! This is the brave new world of “just-in-time” administrative, clerical, legal and financial professionals (Calian’s words not mine). In this high-tech new economy nirvana, people become - more than ever – commodities in the supply chain to be ordered when needed and disposed when the input-output counters decide the operation is completed. People become disposable.

Now in an age where the market, flexibility, and competition are heralded as the saviour of all social ills, this might come as no surprise. Yet, it is important to note that BTS’ largest client is the Federal Government. Having secured a number of “Temporary Help Standing Offers,” BTS has supplied the Government with receptionists, help desk workers, data workers, and a host of other administrative and professional workers. In the federal retrenchment of the 1990’s, Larry O made huge profits from supplying the feds with workers and defence services (see previous post), and facilitating Paul Martin’s “hell or high water” cuts to the public service.

Our Revanchist Mayor is also Minister of Retrenchment and Privatization (i.e. profit over people), and when he calls out for more power (as he did, or did not this week) be very wary. Larry O has made his fortune enabling government to marginalize workers in the government sector all while his firm skims from their lower hourly wage to make record profits. The buddy of arms dealers is also a recalcitrant denier of worker’s rights, decent jobs and the right to a living wage. So when Larry O asks for new powers to manage city contracts and for the city to fire 1000 workers, we should fear him. Larry “zero for zero’s” is prone to turning to his corporate buddies to bail him out from his train to nowhere and back, and considering his past at Calian, his power grab may just be a veiled attempt to temporize and privatize the city’s workforce.

*Thanks to R.J. for the tip on this...