Underpaid, Overworked and Unprotected
How Immigrant Temp Workers are Taken Advantage of in New Jersey
Due to fear mongering and otherism rhetoric, immigrants in the United States are often silenced or ignored.
In these circumstances, they are rarely protected under the law from exploitative and illegal employment and discrimination practices. When someone is not a citizen, especially if that person is Black or Brown, they can be easily taken advantage of right under the nose of the government.
Make the Road New Jersey is working to combat these unfortunate realities. Make the Road, which is based in Elizabeth, NJ, is comprised of immigrants and activists who are fighting for immigrant justice and rights. Craig Garcia, a staff member of Make the Road, spoke with me to explain how often immigrant employees, especially in regards to temp work, get taken advantage of. The interview has been edited for clarity.
What temp work do the employees you work with typically do?
Most of them work out of these temp agencies. You see this in a lot of lower income, especially immigrant communities. And they work in temp agencies that are essentially funnels for warehouse work — distribution for all sorts of things. Pretty much anything you can find from groceries to tee-shirts. They’ll deliver to Macy’s, Walmart, whatever they come across.
How many hours do temp workers typically receive? Is it pretty inconsistent?
It varies. There’s a lot of opportunities for part-time work, but there are plenty of full time temps. And most of the folks we’re dealing with are what we generally call perma-temps. Certainly there is work, you can go into one of these temp agencies and get work for a day or two, maybe a week. Usually they’re looking for people to work like a whole week or something, right? And it goes up and down by season. But very often we also have people that are “temps” working at the same place for the past six years, working 40 hours a week.
How much are temp employees typically paid?
The majority of the folks we work for are immigrant workers. And most of the temp agencies are a way for [employers] to hire undocumented workers and sort of hide that fact. We see a lot of jobs for $9, sometimes we see offers of $10 an hour too these days. But we’re talking about a couple cents over the minimum wage or a dollar over the minimum wage.
One thing we see often, which is illegal but it’s still common practice, is that the jobs posted for men and jobs posted for women differ. The jobs posted for women are like $9 an hour or $9 to $10 an hour. And the jobs posted for men are $10, $11, $12 an hour.
Do you feel as though their wages cover their cost of living?
It’s definitely not enough to survive. There’s a couple ways that people manage it. Especially in the part-time positions, you’ll see a lot of women will take these jobs because it gives them the flexibility and time to drop the kids off at school. Many of the part-time positions are held by women and they’re supplementing their husband’s salary, which is usually not much more. Usually in the immigrant community you’ll see men working construction for about $12 to $15 an hour now.
And even doing that, what most people end up doing is not having an apartment with their family alone. They’ll live with another family or extended family. And they’ll pull together. So you’re not having families live in a home by themselves. They’ll tend to take a single family home and put several families in one home. Maybe one of the families has one bedroom, the other family takes the other room and they’ll share the kitchen or something like that. So what ends up happening is they pull together resources to find other ways to reduce the cost of living.
What challenges do immigrant temp workers face that others don’t have to worry about?
Years ago, a warehouse job here in New Jersey might have paid like $20 an hour. Or at least $15 or something like that. And now, the race has gone down to the bare minimum. And what ends up happening when you have these workers working through a temp agency at a warehouse, they’re not technically employees of the warehouse. So say they wanted to form a union, they can’t because they’re employees of a temp agency.
When you form a union, you have to organize what they call a community of interest. They may have a base of workers working in one warehouse, but they also move other temp workers between different warehouses. As long as [companies] can show that they move some workers between warehouses, if anyone tried to unionize that work force, they would have to organize multiple warehouses or the entire temp agency. And the problem with organizing a temp agency is that the workforce changes day to day.
Warehouses can do all sorts of tricks to try to prevent it [unionizing] like hiring a bunch of new employees or firing everyone. By law, it’s theoretically possible to organize a temp agency. But in practice, it’s literally impossible.
What changes need to be made in order improve the lives of immigrant temp workers?
Ideally, there would be federal regulations making it easier to organize temp workers by worksites. There were some movements in that direction first under [President Bill] Clinton and then under [President Barack] Obama, but every time we’ve had a Republican president it’s been eroded. Seriously eroded under Trump. We used to have this rule that allowed you to have joint employment status and Trump’s done away with that. Joint employment means that you can organize the temp agency’s workers in a warehouse and include them in the bargaining of warehouse workers.
There are certainly regulations we can put forward here at a state level that can improve conditions. Someone should not be working 6 years, 40 hours a week as a temp worker. They’re basically a permanent employee that’s being shifted or screwed out on what they should be earning. And the temp agency makes a little money for every hour they work, which could be going to the worker.
When you’re a temp worker, there’s a lack of health and safety protections and training. When there’s an accident in the warehouse, the temp agency points their finger at the warehouse owner and the warehouse owner points their finger at the temp agency. So there’s a lot of basic protections that can be improved for temp workers.
Basically they’ve made the workforce completely bend to the profit of companies, rather than considering any sense of human dignity.
