Commentary : For Temps, There Are No Holidays : Labor: Are you invisible on the job? Underpaid? No job security? No rights? You must be a contingent worker.
As Americans race to the beach and fire up their barbecues this Labor Day weekend, an army of young temporary workers will keep American businesses humming--and they won’t get holiday pay to do it.
It’s old news that while young workers are more educated than ever, they are economically worse off than their parents’ generation. U.S. Department of Education statistics show that annual earnings for young adults (age 25-34) have fallen considerably since the early 1970s, even for the college-educated. Despite popular fascination with young Web designers and Internet millionaires, the occupation that will add the most jobs in upcoming years, according to the Labor Department, is retail cashiers.
But for the 1 out of 6 young adults expected to hold a temporary job before they turn 35, the picture is even more bleak.
Few benefits, lower wages, diminished labor standards--this is reality for the nearly 1 million temps under age 35. On average, they earn 16.5% less than their regularly employed counterparts. When it comes to benefits, temps better take their vitamins and look both ways before crossing the street: Only 5% receive employer-provided health insurance. About 15% have a retirement plan.
If they suffer on-the-job abuses such as discrimination and harassment, temps may just as well pack up and head out. Who is responsible for workplace standards--the agency that cuts the paycheck or the company where the temp physically works? And why would the staffing agency alienate a good customer (the client company) by protecting a temp, anyway, if it could just move the temp to a new site?
Some companies, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly bold in their uses of temps, often simply replacing their permanent employees with what has been popularly termed “permatemps”--employees who walk and quack like regular workers but are misclassified as temps. Some unscrupulous employers use these loopholes to cut costs, thereby undermining fair labor standards and fair competition. With the rise of permatemps, no job is safe.
Meanwhile, discontent with temp life among the temps themselves, which has been bubbling beneath the surface of American culture for years, is reaching a boil. The movie “Clockwatchers” dramatized the all-too-real resentments between temps and permanent workers in the workplace. The Web site https://www.temp24-7.com, which defines “temp” as an acronym for “totally exploitable menial prostitutes”) gives temps a forum for venting about the daily humiliations on the job and offers, with biting humor, suggestions for the most subversive ways to slack off.
These gripes and complaints may yet produce the seeds of real and lasting change. High-tech permatemps in Seattle are unionizing through a group called Washtech, which now has a bargaining unit to negotiate with Microsoft. Young people are getting wise to the fact that unregulated, unfair corporate practices can be stopped.
Already, there is a struggle taking place in the policy arena: Temp agencies and their client companies are lobbying to legalize some of their most outrageous practices. Meanwhile, groups that advocate fair standards for temp workers are trying to close the policy loopholes that enable the industry to exploit employees. Our organization has proposed a temporary workers “bill of rights” outlining what should be basics for all people in the workplace: grievance procedures, safety, training, wages and more.
When contingent workers are used only on a short-term basis--and provided with the rights and protections available to regular workers--temporary jobs will begin to resemble good jobs. But for many young people in the work force, the current economic boom is still a distant echo.
