COVID has made a bad situation worse for temporary workers
Jonathan Gonzalez has a story to tell. It’s not about himself, but about a single day in April when he was assigned by temp agency to a Jersey City manufacturing facility as the novel coronavirus pandemic was taking hold of the state and the country.
The facility, which I’m not naming, packages food — cans, boxes, bags of prepared and pre-prepared food — for shipment to intermediate warehouses and supermarkets, and runs 24 hours. Gonzalez worked an overnight shift, what was supposed to be 5 p.m. until 1 or 2 a.m. — though he was there until about 5 because of mandatory overtime.
Gonzalez, 34, only lasted a single day. What he saw worried him and, unlike others whom he worked beside, he could walk away. The others on the late shift were largely Hispanic from a variety of South American and Caribbean countries, most of whom he assumed needed the job and couldn’t afford to burn bridges with their temp agency. Basically, as he put it, he could walk and they couldn’t.
I was connected to Gonzalez by Temp Worker Justice, which describes itself as a ”nonprofit that supports temporary workers and workers’ organizations seeking justice and fairness in the workplace.” I had called Dave DeSario, its director, to talk about the issues facing temp works during the novel coronavirus pandemic for a story for The Progressive (https://progressive.org/dispatches/temp-workers-most-vulnerable-kalet-200811/). DeSario outlined some of the most troubling issues, many of which were not COVID-specific:
— inconsistent scheduling
— lack of personal protective equipment like gloves and boots
— wage theft
— imposed transportation costs
— a lack of stability or job security
“Temps are treated like second class citizens,” DeSario said, a situation that has grown worse during the pandemic. “Simple accommodations such as staggered shifts, or six-foot distancing, or availability of personal protective equipment, those sort of things, those are not happening in equal ways for temps. So, we’d say they’re at greater risk.”
What DeSario described was not a surprise. In my late teens and early 20s, after dropping out of college, I’d done the temp rounds — stapling calendar pages in a dark and dirty print shop, picking tools from massive shelving units and packing them into boxes, filing in an office. The jobs were tedious and the management had little concern for our well-being. The demographics were different — white and black, with few Hispanic workers — but no one had any illusions that they had any power. We could be sent home at any moment for any reason.
Many of the men — it was nearly all men at the time — with whom I worked had been working in factories or higher paying jobs, union jobs, that were just starting their migration south. This was during the Reagan recession of the early 1980s, which was the first major wave of deindustrialization to hit the industrial north. They busted their asses, working far more diligently than I did, than I could as a 20-year-old college drop-out and wanna-be writer. They did not know any other way, but they also lacked the kind of protections they were used to, which they made clear to each other during breaks.
That was nearly four decades ago, but the stories I’ve heard in recent years writing about the largely Latino and Latina workers who now make up the bulk of the industrial temp pool makes it clear that little has changed. The temp industry has grown dramatically since then and morphed from something small firms relied on to fill in short-term gaps into long-term assignments. One Mexican woman I talked with recently, a woman named Hilario Franco, has worked the same job at the same warehouse for 10 years, working for four different temp agencies. Often the companies would close without warning, and she and her coworkers would not be paid.
DeSario told me this is normal — temp agencies get hit with judgments by state or federal authorities for wage and hour violations, or possibly for workplace safety rules and the agencies shut down and disappear. New ones pop up and take over and the workers lose out on any back wages.
In New Jersey, there are pockets of industrial zones manned mostly by temps, mostly by immigrants who often lack legal status. They are vulnerable to threats, can’t drive (licenses were only legalized for the undocumented earlier this year, shortly before the state Motor Vehicle Commission was closed as part of the COVID prevention efforts), and are at the mercy of employers. Most end up relying on vans that are not directly connected to the temp agencies, but are part of a murky web of services that resemble the old company town model. But instead of forcing workers to shop at company-owned stores, this web of industries rely on workers’ lack of power and access to other services to lock them into jobs and transportation that are less than ideal.
I was skeptical of talking with Gonzalez, assuming his experience would not be typical. In many ways it wasn’t, but what he witnessed during one 12-hour shift tracked almost perfectly with the stories I heard from worker advocates and the handful of workers unafraid to talk about their work.
Gonzalez is an American citizen. He had worked as a legal aide in the past, but had been out on disability for several years. He started at the warehouse, through a temp agency, because he wanted to get back into the workforce. He thought it a good way to get himself back on his feet, but what he saw alarmed him.
Workers would be herded into the cafeteria, no masks and no social distancing.
PPE was haphazard — some had work gloves and steal-toed boots, others did not. There were some hand sanitizing stations, but hand washing was limited to breaks and limited by the sheer number of people who needed to use the restroom and sinks. Scheduling seemed inconsistent, with the length of a workday up to management.
It started with the training, he said, and continued throughout the work day. Workers were tested after training, he said, and those who can’t pass the tests are not supposed to work. But the need for workers was great, and the trainers would step in.
“You’re not supposed to get more than three (answers) wrong,” he said. “Okay, obviously people were getting more than three wrong for like each section whatever whatever it was. So (the trainers) would review everybody’s answer and there was so many people that they got more than three wrong, so he corrected them.”
The trainer, Gonzalez said, didn’t require them to rewatch the training videos or retake the test, Gonzalez said. He just passed them along, which meant there were poorly trained workers on the warehouse floor.
That was bad, he said, but the lack of protections against COVID were appalling, even if it was still relatively early in the pandemic. Masks were not mandated, even though CDC guidelines had changed earlier in the month to encourage mask wearing when staying 6 feet apart was not possible. This was the case at his warehouse, he said, where workers were essentially on top of each other, both on the warehouse floor and in the cafeteria.
Nothing was wiped down and disinfected, and this included things like the coffee pot in the cafeteria.
“The coffee pot was like a petrie dish,” he said. “Everybody’s breathing on it and touching it.”
He told me it was “like a prison,” with everyone “on top of each other, sharing communal stuff,” and there was “no addressing it, the pandemic, except we got our hand sanitizers.”
Most of the workers on the late shift were Hispanic, like him, but most didn’t have command of English. This is common in the industry, DeSario and other labor organizers told me, which relies on vulnerable workers to maintain control of the work force and suppress wages. Everything is about cost and profit, an attitude that turns workers into easily replaceable parts.
Gonzalez told me the job was not worth the risks, especially during a pandemic, but he knows he was in a rare position to be able to walk away. It’s something he had not realized until he spent 12 hours packing and wrapping pallets for shipment.
“Imagine somebody’s working there, witnessing that throughout their whole lifetime,” he said. It’s been four months and he’s still shocked at what he saw. “To realize how hard people in warehouses — and this for every agency — how hard they work, how hard they have it.” He stops.
I get it I tell him. I’ve talked to a lot of workers over the years, but the image that sticks with me when talking about temps is this: I was driving home from class in New Brunswick. It was late in the day, probably after 6 p.m. Before COVID. Just a regular work day. I’m stopped at a light and a white van pulls to the curb and a dozen Latinos spill out. Most were men, but there were a few women. My window was open. They weren’t speaking. They just exited the van and walked down the street, like they had no choice. Like they knew it would be the same the next day.
I watched until the light changed, snapped a photo and thought about getting out and talking with them. But they dispersed as quickly as they hit the pavement, fading into the urban landscape.