Catching Out - and why you should care about day labor...

[jtuck004]

I know this is a little long, but it is likely to affect a good number of people in this country that think they will never work from a day labor hall...

I just finished a book called Catching Out by Dick J. Reavis, an English Professor at North Carolina State University. Nearing retirement and looking for a way to increase his income he found work at Labor-4-U, a business that provides day labor for the contingent workforce. As a writer he found few popular works on day labor that dealt with the aboveground industry (not undocumented workers), and what research there was consisted mainly of people who surveyed workers and businesses. So he showed up to work, and gave us a pretty good view of what it is like to be employed for a 4-hour minimum day. (I put the direct quotes from the book in the blocks).

There are approximately 2 million such workers, perhaps more today. If you have a regular job, this may be a book you should read. In the last chapter he tells us why we should begin to pay more attention to the conditions and circumstances of their work.


You have to take a multiple-choice test to work at some of these places...

The test...

Which of the following drugs have you taken in the past week?
In the past year, how many times have you hit somebody?
If someone threatens you, how important do you think it is to fight to defend yourself?

A section of the test about workplace safety came with a ten-page booklet in whose text were embedded answers to all of its questions.

You work without protection from most non-life-threatening injuries. If injured, and lucky, you are likely to be dropped at an emergency room, and the boss disappears. If you hurt your back, and these jobs often involve labor that can lead to this, it means either you find a way to anesthetize yourself, or, if you have to take off, your work and pay ends until you are better. There's not much compassion.

He tells a story about working in a printing plant where the din is nearly unbearable, in the days before ear plugs. The veteran employees suggested a beer an hour, which lowers the roar a bit. The bosses look the other way because it is cheaper for the workers to buy their own beer than to insulate the plant.

...the boss man went into a long tirade about being unable to find reliable employees "these days" because "nobody wants to work anymore"...Why, he said he'd set up a 401(k) plan for his regular employees, but none of them wanted to contribute...the Mexican, who'd been with the boss for a year, earned ten fifty. The boss man was out of touch with reality: With wages like theirs, who could afford contributions to a retirement plan?

Regulation of the industry and the treatment of these workers has received little attention.

Nearly everyone takes advantage of them, these people who work every day below the bottom rung of the business ladder. A New York company, Labor Ready, wound up in court for the prices they charged the workers to cash the "voucher", which represented their too-small paychecks, in the machine on the company premises. A recent study, here noted that people with an income of $12,000 a year had an unemployment rate of 30% in late 2009, worse than the country average during the Great Depression.

...The worker who reports to a labor hall every morning, as most agency day laborers do, is an "employee" without the customary protections and benefits of a full-time job...the General Accounting Office...found "the responsibilities of temporary staffing agencies under the OSH (Occupational Safety and Health Act) are unclear...the data OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) uses cannot identify the extent to which day laborers working for temporary staffing agencies are injured or killed...contingent employment shows what might be called a ratcheting effect, in which after each (economic) downturn, the industry gains ground...increasing its market share...

Reavis has a message for the people with a regular job. Pay more attention to laws that insure parity in pay and medical care outside of the emergency rooms (where taxpayers subsidize employers) for people that work day labor, because if you don't...

He discusses Japan, noting that when they came off of their economic high point years ago, instead of issuing pink slips workers were ordered to report for no pay. Today, the full and lifetime employment they once enjoyed is largely gone, and a third of the workforce has been replaced by day and short-term labor. The benefits like medical care and vacations are gone as well. Not everyone thinks that's a bad thing. The Economist Magazine in their March 2009 issue called regular workers "mollycoddled folk", who should be made easier to fire so they can be replaced with contingent workers.

...as long as a gap exists between the earning and benefits of regular employees and temps, that gap can be closed in two ways: by improving the lot of temporary workers, or by diminishing the benefits and earnings of the "mollycoddled folk"...These circumstances leave those of us in the regular employment market no option. Support for the interests of those in the lowest ranks of labor protects us.

Ignoring them exposes us to their fate.

[truedelphi]

1. Gosh, it sounds like the management at BP read this book before

Deciding how to treat the poor people they are using for the Gulf tragedy cleanup.

"Let's see, if we buy them all respirators, they may think we are liable for the crap that is happening to their lungs and other body organs. But if we don't, they will just get sick and stay home when the illness gets the better of them. And then we can say, for the record, that they are slackers! (Or that they had food poisioning.")