Temp World

by Margie M. Mitchell

part 2 (conclusion)

Part 1 of the following article appeared in our Nov/Dec 2005 issue and can also be read at www.wafreepress.org/78/tempWorld.shtml.

During the six months of my employ as a "leased worker", picking and packing at a factory, I took only a handful of days off, worked many mandatory ten-hour days, and a number of required weekend days too. I was maxed-out physically and afraid I might get hurt or sick if I continued this pace without some letup. If I got hurt on the job, I was royally screwed. A lot of temps came and went during this six-month period. Some left as a result of repetitive motion injuries, while others just stopped showing up. And there were those who cycled through, over and over again, without explanation or ado.

The hours were grueling. I asked the temp agency to cut my hours back to part-time. They said there were no part-time positions available. I grumbled openly about this, and not long after, an employee at the manufacturing plant slipped me the number for Human Resources. I called and left a message that expressed my interest in a part-time position, along with my home phone number. No one ever got back to me.

The number of mandatory hours increased. I told the temp agency that physically I needed some reprieve. 40 hours a week might have been doable, but 50 plus hours a week of repetitive labor was enough to kill anyone, and I wasn't going down without a fight. Complaining to another temp one day in the break room, she said she wanted part-time too. We came up with the idea of splitting a full-time slot, and approached the temp agency together to propose the idea. The recruiter said she would look into the matter, but she never got back to me with a answer. Not wanting to quit, I pushed the temp agency to give me an ending date for my assignment. Successfully completing a job for the temp firm was an accomplishment, albeit a small one, but I didn't want to leave without it. Several days later, one of the new recruiters provided me with a date for my last day.

I took a month off to retool my energy. While reconnecting with my creative pursuits, I searched for part-time employment. I landed a job cleaning house for a local college professor. One day a week, a hundred bucks a pop--the situation allowed for me to return to my "real work," my creative ambitions that I hoped one day might afford me an opportunity to eke out a small living.

For infusions of quick cash, I contacted the first temp agency I had worked for to request an assignment. The duration of a given assignment was rarely, if ever, mentioned. I found that when I asked the contact person at an assigned site regarding the length of a particular assignment, I was handed my walking papers. Like that day.

Periodically, I mailed my resume out to various part-time jobs advertised in the local newspaper. I don't recall receiving a single response from any of my letters of interest. My work for the professor seemed to be working out, so I presented him with a written agreement, detailing his expectations of me, along with my needs in terms of pay, job description, and so forth. My contracted work for the professor led to my first paid writing gig. Under the terms of several contractual agreements with the professor, I took back the rights lost to me in the world of temporary employment. I am extremely fortunate, in that my creative ambitions and the special people in my life were clear to my mind. I believe this prevented me from derailing off course.

Contingent workers--when you include on-call workers, independent contractors, temps, and contracted staff--accounted for nearly 11% of the US labor force in 2005, according the the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Employers have benefited greatly from their use of the contingent work force to meet seasonal fluctuations, to accomplish specific tasks of a limited duration, and to fill family-leave and sick-time vacancies. Even so, seven out of ten firms surveyed by the American Management Association in 1999 reported replacing at least some regular workers with temps for routine tasks.

Though contingent work can provide a useful opportunity for some workers to juggle multiple responsibilities, such as work and school, according to the United States Labor Department, employees in contingent arrangements earn lower pay and receive few, and sometimes no health benefits.

The expanding contingent work force is changing the nature of staffing and restructuring the face of the labor force. As a result, some firms and analyst are looking at issues over the long haul, and examining the long term consequences to business and society as the work force increasingly falls outside of the traditional work force rights and protections that have developed over the last half of the century.

Many firms turn to contingent labor because they believe it will reduce the number of employment related lawsuits, since the workers technically belong to the staffing agency, but a lawsuit brought against Microsoft Corporation in 1999 sheds light the risks of misclassifying long-term employees as temps and independent contractors in an effort to avoid tax and benefit expenses. The ninth circuit court of appeals ruled that regardless of written contracts and labels used to designate the status of temp workers, Microsofts' common-law employees are entitled to the same benefits as permanent staff. Microsoft Corp. settled the lawsuit against them for a whopping 97 million dollars in December of 2000, and as many as 10,000 temporary employees, even those who had signed agreements stating they were not eligible for benefits, must now be allowed to participate in the company's stock-option plan.

According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, many businesses are vulnerable to similar lawsuits for their misuse of perma-temps. One quarter of the temps surveyed by statisticians from the US Bureau of Labor had been in their assignments for more than one year.

Increasingly, the US Federal Government is taking a more vigilant stance toward the classification of workers, and a number of high profile cases involving large corporations and temp workers are proving to be influential in various bills that address inequities in pay and benefits for contingent workers who fall into the category of "common-law employees". Under common-law rules, anyone who performs services for an employee organization is that organization's employee if that employee organization can control what is done and how it is done.

Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington State are already addressing problems surrounding the misclassification of employees as independent contractors. According to the US Department of Labor, these states are working to insure that all employees have equal access to worker protections and rights. Washington State's proposed Employee Fairness Act will make it a misdemeanor to classify a worker with an intent to avoid providing that worker with employer-based benefits.

Corporate America has been making its profits on the backs of folks who have little. We, as a society let them get away with it because they buy new playground equipment for our schools, provide scholarship funds for disadvantaged youth, and purchase new equipment for our county rescue squads. They remind us at every turn how much we rely on their means to be generous.

I urge communities to poke around in the back rooms of companies before you accept their money. Consumers need to hit companies in the pocketbook which are lax in their monitoring of wages, benefits and working conditions. Labor inequities regarding the "have nots" in big business are not a new concept, but the face on the "working herds" is ever changing. I come from a well-educated, upper middle class family. Life threw me some curve balls and I became one of the many faces in the growing contingent work force. Good people in my life assisted me off the treadmill that kept me running in one place. Others, I know, were not so lucky.*