Miranda Dietz is a Research Data Analyst at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. Previously she worked at the Stanford Center on Longevity studying aging and demographic change in the US and around the globe. In 2012 she received a Masters in Public Policy from UC Berkeley. During graduate school she interned with the City of San Francisco, was a Graduate Student Instructor for a micro-economics and public policy course, and worked as a Graduate Student Researcher at the Labor Center studying temporary and subcontracted work in California.

Report: Poverty and the Rise of Temporary and Contingent Work

by Miranda Dietz

The nature of employment is changing. Employees are increasingly seen as liabilities rather than assets, and so workers are kept at arm's length from the companies they ultimately serve. Middle-class long-term jobs are shifting to precarious, low-wage work. These contingent relationships include temporary and subcontracted workers, whose ranks have been growing over the past two decades.

In California almost one-quarter of a million people worked in the temporary help services industry in 2010; another 37,000 people worked for employee leasing firms totaling 282,000 workers in these two industries. This accounted for approximately 2.0 percent of all non-farm employment in California in 2010, approximately the same ratio as for the U.S. as whole.