The disposable worker is already in your office

MIT's Paul Osterman says 35% of US workers are now treated as disposable, and few are gig workers. Glasgow shows how insecure even an employee's contract can be.

When people hear “disposable worker”, they picture someone on a bike with a delivery bag. Paul Osterman says that picture is the problem.

Osterman is a professor emeritus at MIT Sloan. His new book, Disposable Workers, is built on a survey of more than 6,000 US workers and nearly 100 interviews. He calculates that 35% of workers are “disposable”, and gig workers are less than two percent of the workforce. His own summary: “we’re not becoming a gig economy; we’re becoming a disposable one.”

Who counts as disposable

Most of them are people you’d walk past in any office. Contractors. Freelancers. And a group Osterman calls “marginal workers”, people who are, as MIT puts it, “technically on staff but never fully brought into their organisations”. His examples are lecturers kept off the tenure track, and lawyers at big firms doing the routine case work with no chance of ever making partner.

Mark C. Crowley, who interviewed Osterman in July, sums up the order firms work through before they hire anyone. Automate the work if they can. Outsource it if they can’t. Bring in contractors next. Take on a full-time employee as the last resort.

Those are US figures. The UK measures it differently, but the Work Foundation’s UK Insecure Work Index 2024 found 6.8 million people, 21.4% of the workforce, in severely insecure work in 2023.

Fire and rehire in Glasgow

Then there’s Glasgow. On 24 September, STV reported that Glasgow City Council would dismiss around 24,000 non-teaching staff and take them back on new contracts from 1 January.

The council’s case is that the new pay and grading scheme ends unequal pay, that pay rises or stays the same for 90% of staff, and that its total pay bill goes up. Unequal pay is a real wrong, and it needs putting right. GMB and Unite had agreed to ballot their members on a deal with more money for back pay that would have taken the dismissals off the table. It depended on all three unions balloting, and Unison pulled out.

But around 11% of the people affected would earn less. And Unison said the council “wanted our assistance to avoid new workers’ rights that come in January 2027”. The government’s own timeline says the Employment Rights Act’s fire and rehire protections take effect in January 2027. Unison says the council chose to issue dismissal letters on 24 September, a few months before those protections arrive.

On 25 September the plans were put on hold until the end of the following week, after talks involving the Deputy First Minister, Jenny Gilruth. Paused, not withdrawn.

Update, 2 October: STV reported on 1 October that talks with Unison had broken down again, and the council had ended the pause on letters to Unison members.

Glasgow’s staff aren’t contractors. They’re employees, many of them for years. And an employment contract turns out to be something an employer can tear up and hand back on new terms, and if Unison is right about the timing, the new rights were what the council was trying to get ahead of.

What it does to people

When MIT sums up Osterman’s marginal workers as “never fully brought into their organisations”, it’s describing people who don’t belong where they work. People who know they could be let go, replaced or moved onto worse terms carry that into work every day. It’s part of what people carry into work, and no diagnostic checklist will pick it up.

If you run a wellbeing strategy, who is it for?

Who gets the employee assistance programme, the mental health first aiders, the wellbeing budget, the training? And who does the same work alongside them, but sits outside all of it because they’re on someone else’s books?

A wellbeing offer that stops at the payroll

I’ve written before about who broke the social contract. You can’t train your way out of a problem built into how a company is set up: who it hires, who it keeps at arm’s length, and whose contract it treats as something to rewrite.

A wellbeing strategy that stops at the payroll isn’t a wellbeing strategy. It’s a perk for the people the company has decided to keep.

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