For desperate workers that turn to temp agencies for a
step up, too often they find only quicksand.
Editor’s note:
the original
version of this article appeared in Mother Jones. In that article, Gabriel
quotes Progressive Charlestown co-editor Will Collette who headed up the
AFL-CIO corporate campaign (2001-3) that focused on Labor Ready. Much of the
historical material in the article was drawn from Will’s original research.
It seemed that Joseph Holman, a 51-year-old redhead
from Brooklyn, had climbed into the middle class the old-fashioned way: by the
sweat of his brow.
Two decades ago, Holman moved to California
and settled down in Hayward, a working class city about 10 miles south of
Oakland. He soon found work as a union laborer, earning $25 an hour plus
benefits. Along the way, he married, had two sons, and purchased a spacious
house in a quiet neighborhood — complete with flowers out front and a pool in
the backyard.
What took 16 years to accomplish, however, the Great Recession quickly unraveled. Work at the union hall slowed to a trickle, then stopped. Last year, his unemployment ran out. Holman sent off countless job applications, but no one was hiring. Out of options, he recently turned to Labor Ready, the country's largest blue-collar temp agency, where most jobs pay the minimum wage.
"They're about to put a padlock on the door of my
house," Holman said, waiting in front of Labor Ready's Hayward storefront.
Facing imminent foreclosure, he's moved all his furniture to his in-laws'
house. "We've got enough food in the fridge for a few days."
Holman faces an emergency, but he's far from
alone. While the number of temp workers has increased sevenfold over the past
four decades — ballooning to 2.5 million people today — the most dramatic
increase has been among blue-collar workers. In 1989, for example, only 1 in 43
manufacturing jobs was temporary. By 2006, 1 in 11 was. "All I need is a
real job," he told me. "But now it seems everyone only wants
temps."
The temp boom has upended Holman's life, but
it is welcome news for companies like Labor Ready, which operates 600 offices
and boasts a workforce of 400,000 — more employees than Target or Home Depot.
Labor Ready's parent company, TrueBlue, saw its profits rise 55 percent last
year, to $31 million. TrueBlue CEO Steve Cooper, who took home nearly $2
million last year, predicts "a bright future ahead."
But as I learned during a two-week stint
working for Labor Ready, that "bright future" for investors and
executives doesn't apply to the company's army of temps, who often spend hours
each day in dispatch offices waiting for jobs paying poverty wages. Even worse,
on multiple occasions I witnessed Labor Ready employees ordering temps to show
up 30 minutes before a shift began, time for which they weren't compensated.
That amounts to wage theft.
Of course, one could argue that companies
like Labor Ready simply provide a steppingstone to full-time employment.
Unfortunately, data suggests otherwise. A 2010 study by economists David Autor
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Susan Houseman of the Upjohn
Institute for Employment Research found that low-wage
temp jobs play a negligible — even negative — role in
boosting people's earnings.
Tracking the earnings of nearly 40,000
welfare-to-work participants in Detroit, the authors discovered that people
placed in permanent jobs enjoyed significant and lasting economic benefits. But
after a short spike in earnings, those placed in temp jobs eventually saw a net
decrease in income and employment, even when compared to workers who'd had no
help securing work. Looking at the data, the economists determined that
providing low-skill workers with a temp job "is no more effective than
providing no job placements at all."
Any real recovery will have to provide stable
employment to blue-collar workers, not short-lived temp jobs paying poverty
wages. The trend of outsourcing blue-collar work to temps benefits giant
corporations like Wal-Mart — which frequently uses Labor Ready temps — while
lining the pockets of executives running labor agencies. But for desperate
workers who turn to temp agencies for a step up, too often they find only quicksand.
Gabriel
Thompson, the author of the books Working in the Shadows, There’s
No José Here, and Calling All Radicals, wrote a longer version of this commentary for the Economic Hardship
Reporting Project. EconomicHardship.org Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)