I found my first job out of college through a temp agency, which sent me to a brand-name bank where I stood in a windowless closet in a polyester-blend suit and heinous square-toed shoes filing carbons of personal portfolio data for individual-wealth-management clients. I was grateful to be hired, but during those humid, lifeless hours, I did think fondly of the days when I shoveled horse manure for $5 an hour.
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. A temp job is perhaps better than no job at all (and can sometimes lead to a permanent one), but at least 840,000 of those workers are making less than $25,000 a year, ProPublica found. 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." Minorities make up a large portion of the temporary workers; Grabell notes that African-Americans make up 20 percent of the temp industry, compared to 11 percent of the overall work force.
Low wages and a lack of any kind of benefits like health insurance or day care bolster Grabell's argument that the temp industry is creating a kind of vacuum for growing economic inequality. When one temp worker tells Grabell that she dreams of owning "a really small, little house," he asks if she thinks she can, and she laughs.
"'Earning $8.25 an hour?' she says. "I don't think I'll ever be able to do that.'"
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