Temp Workers, Permanent Problems
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The experiences of temp workers chronicled by Michael Grabell for ProPublica and Time are far, far worse: getting up at 4 in the morning to sit in an agency office and hope for your name to be called; having no other option but to take van rides with as many as 20 other people to get to your job; taking home less than minimum wage and falling quickly into a hand-to-mouth scramble, always worrying whether your name will be called tomorrow.
Grabell writes that there are more temporary workers now than ever before, some 2.7 million people, according to Labor Department statistics.
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The temp industry is expanding at a rate 10 times that of the private sector — it’s easy to speculate that this growth comes at the expense of full-time jobs.
“The temp system insulates the host companies from workers’ compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to insure that their workers are citizens or legal immigrants,” Grabell writes. “In turn, the temps suffer high injury rates, according to federal officials and academic studies, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below minimum wage.”
Recruiting a temporary work force has become so important to American companies that there are so-called temp towns, where anywhere from 5 to 8 percent of the workers are in temporary jobs. “In many temp towns,” Grabell writes, “agencies have flocked to neighborhoods full of undocumented immigrants, finding labor that is kept cheap in part by these workers’ legal vulnerability.”
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http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/temp-workers-permanent-problems/?_r=0
Also,
The Expendables: How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed
http://www.propublica.org/article/the-expendables-how-the-temps-who-power-corporate-giants-are-getting-crushe
