Their jobs are tentative, even when they have worked at the same warehouse for years. They feel vulnerable. And it has only gotten worse since the coronavirus pandemic began.
“Temps are treated like second-class citizens. Simple accommodations such as staggered shifts, or six-foot distancing, or availability of personal protective equipment, those sort of things are not happening in equal ways for temps. So, we’d say they’re at greater risk.”
Consider the case of Hilaria Franco,, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who has been working for ten years at the same warehouse in North Brunswick, New Jersey. Franco contracted COVID-19 and missed several weeks of work. She didn’t get paid during this time because she doesn’t get paid sick days and doesn’t qualify for unemployment insurance. She is employed as a temporary worker through one of the region’s dozens of employment agencies, which means she is essentially invisible.
Workers like Franco make up a large portion of the warehouse and industrial workforce in many areas, according to workers’ rights advocates. These workers are part of a system, advocates say, designed to suppress wages and disperse responsibility for safety and work conditions, which helps bolster their employer’s bottom lines.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were about 5.9 million “contingent” workers in the United States in May 2017—the last date for which numbers were available. These are workers, according to a June 2018 press release, “who do not expect their jobs to last or who report that their jobs are temporary.”
BLS also reported that there were 10.6 million independent contractors, 2.6 million on-call workers, 1.4 million temporary help agency workers, and 933,000 workers provided by contract firms. The numbers, according to BLS, may overlap, with workers falling into several of these categories.
“Temps are treated like second-class citizens,” David DeSario, president of Temp Worker Justice, told me. He said the situation has grown worse during the pandemic. “Simple accommodations such as staggered shifts, or six-foot distancing, or availability of personal protective equipment, those sort of things are not happening in equal ways for temps. So, we’d say they’re at greater risk.”
In a recent survey conducted by Temp Worker Justice, about 15 percent of temps said no workplace changes have been made to protect them. The survey also found that only 37 percent of temps say they get the same protections as other workers, while another 37 percent said they get fewer protections.
DeSario says the impact can be also seen in wages, as temps earn about 41 percent less than permanent workers in the same industries, based on their surveys. “There’s a huge wage penalty to start.”
He adds that only about 12 percent of temp workers get health insurance through their staffing agency, and few get “things like vacation days or retirement savings or anything like that.”
Industry officials say they work hard to protect workers. Richard Wahlquist, president and chief executive officer of the American Staffing Association, an industry trade group, said in a press release that the staffing agencies and the industry “remain steadfast in their commitment to protecting jobs and the economic health of our nation as we all work together to fight through the pandemic.”
Through contracting systems like 3PL (third-party logistics), temporary agencies and other outsourcing firms tout greater flexibility and lower costs for shipping firms and retailers. For instance, Kane Logistics, a national firm, says on its website that 3PLs are more “agile” and allow companies to quickly respond “to fluctuating order cycles with a flexible warehousing solution,” which includes shared warehouse space and temporary workers.
And, they say, the dislocations caused by COVID-19 have made the need for their services greater than ever.
Louis Kimmel, president of New Labor—a workers’ rights group in New Brunswick, New Jersey, that supports temporary workers, many of whom are undocumented—calls the use of temporary agencies part of a “cheating system” used by multinationals like Walmart, Amazon, and others to keep their costs as low as possible.
Large firms, he says, often contract with smaller warehouse companies, which take in goods from a central distribution center (sometimes staffed by temps, as well), and move them through the supply chain. These smaller warehouses employ only a small number of their own workers, relying on temporary agencies to staff their operations.
“When it comes to the responsibility for the conditions in the warehouse, [that] gets lost along the way,” Kimmel tells me. The multinationals point to the warehouses, the warehouses point to the agencies, and the agencies point to the workers themselves.
“Everyone wants to make a buck along the way,” he says. “The temp worker is at the bottom, stuck in a system that pays minimum or low wages with sometimes dangerous working conditions.” No one has to take responsibility, he adds, so it makes it hard to improve.
Tim Bell, executive director of the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative, says responsibility for wages and safety gets muddled among the web of connecting employers and is complicated further by immigration status. These are workers with little power, or who feel they have little power, because they fear deportation, he says. Employers take advantage of this, knowing that these workers have few options to earn money and they are unlikely to appeal to federal or state agencies for help.
According to Bell, many undocumented temp workers “are seen as throwaway workers” and thus not afforded adequate social distancing and inadequate or nonexistent personal protection equipment.
“The factory owner thinks, ‘these aren’t my workers, I don’t have to worry about it. I’m not going to invest in them. You know, it’s not my worker, right?,’ ” he says. “So the temps often find [and bring] in PPE themselves.”
Carmen Martino, an assistant professor at Rutgers University who has studied the temping industry in New Jersey, says temporary agencies purposely “set up shop in places where there are large numbers of immigrant workers,” because they are more susceptible to threats from employers who might report them to federal immigration authorities.
Temp workers, Martino explains, work at the pleasure of the employer, which makes them doubly vulnerable in the context of COVID-19.
“These temp workers who are undocumented, they can’t collect unemployment, they have no benefits,” he says. They are in a “desperate place,” in which they “go to work every day” as essential workers, subject to enhanced risks of contracting the coronavirus.
“If the employer decides not to protect you from the virus, you’re left exposed,” he says. “And it’s not [just] you. You bring it back home and kill your family.”
The alternative is to skip work and not be paid.
Yadira Garcia worked in a perfume distribution facility in New Jersey, doing packing, receiving, shipping, and other tasks through a temp agency. The facility closed because of the pandemic and she was not paid for several weeks. She was called back after the plant retooled to pack and ship COVID-19 test kits, but Garcia, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, has no idea how long the work will last.
Garcia, speaking through an interpreter, says the temporary closing left her with “no money for medicine, food, rent. No money for transportation.” She is paid $11 an hour—New Jersey’s minimum wage—but she has to pay for transportation to her worksite, which is nearly twenty miles from her home in New Brunswick. Transportation costs $40 a week—usually by taxi or sharing a ride with other workers.
Garcia worries constantly about catching COVID-19 from her fellow warehouse workers or the people she shares rides with. When someone gets sick, she must decide whether to stay home and protect herself and her son, who has asthma, and not get paid, or go to work and risk infection.
These kinds of choices are not new, according to Laura Padin, a senior staff attorney for the National Employment Law Project. “This pandemic has really just exacerbated many of the abusive and unsafe conditions that many temp workers endure,” she says. “The issues that temporary workers were facing beforehand are just heightened.”
Padin describes the “temp-staffing business model” as one designed to exploit workers, “because the temp worker is considered an employee of the temp agency or the staffing company that arranges their assignments.” The system allows the warehouses “to control many of the working conditions without being responsible for them. This really makes it much easier to exploit these workers.”
“A huge amount of temp workers face much greater risk of getting injured on the job than other workers,” she says. “They lack training. They’re assigned the most hazardous positions and they’re just viewed as disposable.”