Chain of Greed

ties. We do know that contracting outis becoming increasingly common inmany of our largest—and some of ourfastest-growing—industries, includingconstruction, 7 day labor, 8 janitorialand building services 9 , homehealth care, 10 warehousing and retail,11 agriculture, 12 poultry and meatprocessing, 13 high-tech, 14 delivery, 15trucking, 16 home-based work, 17 andthe public sectors. 18 Even hotels haverecently outsourced traditional functions,including cleaning services. 19Despite the challenge official dataposes to ascribing the nature ofemployment relationships to workers,we can begin to discern the qualityof these jobs by looking at one typeof domestic outsourcing in whichresearchers have been able to isolatedata: the employment servicesindustry, which includes temporaryagencies. In recent decades, employershave moved away from the traditionaluse of temporary firms for clerical andadministrative work and increasinglyrelied on temporary staffing agenciesfor a wider range of jobs; assembly,packing, manufacturing, buildingservices, and food services are only afew of the kinds of work performedby temp agency employees. Many ofthese outsourced jobs come with asignificant wage penalty. For example,in 2004, construction workersemployed by temporary agenciesmade 49.5 percent less than theirin-house counterparts, temporaryassemblers and fabricators made 49.2percent less, and all other productionworkers supplied by temp agenciessuffered a 39.4 percent wage penalty. 20As the economy struggles to recoverfrom the Great Recession, temporaryagencies are growing significantly.During the third quarter of 2010,the staffing industry estimated 2.6million workers a day worked astemps. 21 Preliminary data from theBureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) forApril 2012 shows almost 2.5 millionpeople working as temps, a 13 percentincrease over their figures for 2010. 22While these temporary employmentfigures cover only a small portionof contracted-out workers in oureconomy, they offer a glimpse ofwhy it is so critical to gain a betterunderstanding of these nonstandardemployment arrangements andaddress the challenges to holdingcorporations all along the contractingchain responsible for adhering to laborlaws and upholding worker standards.05