By Janice Fine and Carmen Martino
Right now, the world’s biggest corporations — brands like Amazon, Target, UPS and Walmart — are hiring tens and even hundreds of thousands of temporary workers to prepare for holiday shopping. Production, warehousing and logistics facilities are swelling with temporary workers. And the holiday season is not the only time of year that logistics companies are staffed by workers faced with the instability, physical dangers, low pay, and non-existent benefits that come along with working in today’s temporary staffing industry.
When the temporary staffing industry took off in the United States, few could have imagined what the industry would come to look like today. Where temp jobs were once advertised to mothers as a flexible job to make a little money and start a career, today, some New Jersey staffing agencies go as far as blatantly advertising the advantages they provide to employers by helping them avoid paying for benefits, unemployment, and workers’ comp insurance for their workforce. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
Rutgers professors like Carmen Martino have spent decades demonstrating the degree to which temp workers are subjected to wage theft, predatory fees, dangerous working conditions, and discrimination as a result of the greed and corruption of agencies and the corporations that contract with them.
The reality is that temp agencies are an outgrowth of the modern world’s most carceral policies and systems. Dominated by Black and brown workers, and by formerly incarcerated workers and undocumented workers, temp agencies serve as a “catch-all’' for workers who find themselves on the margins of society. These workers are intentionally forced into a cycle of poverty: remaining in jobs that are temporary only in terms of their lack of full-time benefits.
In fact, the very term “temporary worker” is deceptive, as most agency workers are not hired to fill in for direct hires in a pinch, but for jobs that can last two or more years. Instead of offering temporary help, workers employed through staffing agencies in fact keep the logistics industry functioning.
As of 2015, a study of 142 logistics facilities in our state showed that more than half of those facilities used workers employed through staffing agencies, and among those, temp workers made up more than half of the workforce. Those agency workers worked an average of 39.2 hours per week. There is nothing “temporary” about that, but “temporary” is certainly a simpler descriptor than “full-time worker with none of the same basic protections as other full-time workers.”
Over the last 10 years, New Jersey temp workers have been killed on the job while working for warehouse agencies contracted by companies like CVS and American Eagle, while working at sugar plants that produce sugar for companies like Ben & Jerry’s and Snapple, and while handling orders for Amazon. In an industry where workers are meant to be cheap and invisible, they too often pay the ultimate price.
If you listen to the agencies and corporations and their lobbyists, you would think they are the victims. The corporate lobbyists claim that by passing the Temporary Workers Bill of Rights (A1474/S511) that the industry will “collapse” and “make New Jersey an unfriendly place to do business.” They claim it will “punish” employers.
This might sound familiar. Last year, when Gov. Phil Murphy signed a set of bills to address employee misclassification, NJBIA argued that the laws are “broad overreaches of power that will only enhance New Jersey’s well-earned reputation of being unfriendly to business.”
When moving to pass earned sick leave for New Jersey workers in 2015, the NJBIA explained, “This is not the time for paid sick leave in New Jersey. We are trying to overcome a reputation as being an unfriendly place for businesses.” Despite the constant predictions of doom, logistics and warehousing in our state is described by impartial observers as “red-hot,” “booming,” and characterized by “insatiable demand.”
These arguments serve only to maintain the industry’s prerogative of cutting labor costs on the backs of workers who are Black, indigenous and people of color in order to keep their profit margins wide. Despite industry talking points, make no mistake: New Jersey’s temporary staffing industry is in desperate need of reform and regulation.
Fortunately, the Temporary Workers Bill of Rights is just a Senate vote and a signature away from becoming law. It will create a reasonable standard for working conditions for temp workers in our state and will level the playing field among staffing agencies so that they can compete fairly, freeing responsible agencies from having to compete with the bad actors that rely on exploitation, abuse, and intimidation to undercut law-abiding agencies.
The bill will eliminate predatory fees that agencies charge workers for background checks and transportation. It w, will align temporary workers’ pay and benefits with their direct-hire counterparts, and will impose stiffer penalties for retaliation and discrimination, which are such a regular part of these vulnerable but essential workers’ experiences. This bill is the most comprehensive of its kind, and it’s critical to the health of our state’s economy.
Having already passed both our Assembly and Senate twice, with widespread support from unions, community organizations, racial and gender justice groups, and immigrants’ rights advocates, the bill has become the example for truly addressing the worker abuse and economic drag that the temporary staffing industry has brought upon us and our communities.
After failing to muster enough yes votes to be able to finally pass A1474/S511 into law in October, our Senate majority will again have the chance to pass this common-sense legislation this month, just before the peak season of many logistics operations with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. . Those Senators who truly value our workers, who care about our economy and communities, who value fair competition and who hold justice close to their hearts, will vote “yes” on A1474/S511. Senators, more than 120,000 New Jersey working families are counting on you.
Janice Fine and Carmen Martino are professors in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
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