Temp agencies

[Counterculturalist]

A friend of mine in Windsor, Ontario is trying to get an anti-temp agency movement going.

http://www.89daylayoff.com/about.html

Any advice or comments are welcome.

[Futility Personified]

Good luck. It's the sort of thing that once it becomes entrenched is very difficult to actually circumvent, where I live the manual workforce (and some of the office workforce) is run by agencies, who even when they want to do their best for you are still ultimately fulfilling the desires of the businesses who hire their services.

It's very tricky as it is essentially the formalisation of scab labour but people who work for agencies don't have any choice. It's hard to fight agencies without fighting those that work for them. If you do have any developments, please post them up here, it'd be of great interest.

[Counterculturalist]

It is certainly a longshot that any mass movement will develop out of this.

I am not directly part of this campaign (I no longer live in Windsor) but I do hope to write for the website. I'd like to see a broader critique of capitalism that could help convince people to take the risk of fighting against temp agencies, and perhaps go on to a deeper struggle against capitalism in general, although I certainly harbor no illusions that a website can do this by itself. The long-term goal here is to eventually stage a walkout by temp-workers to force companies to stop dealing with these agencies. Of course the atomization, competition, and desperation of workers forced to resort to temp agencies makes this goal highly unlikely to come to fruition, but... you never know.

Windsor is an appropriate "ground zero" for this movement. Situated directly across the river from Detroit, its economy was almost entirely dependent on the automotive industry, and has not come close to recovery since the 2008-9 meltdown.

It's a bit too "single-issue" for my liking, but I do think it is deserving of support.

[Creative Destruction]

I do not think this will go anywhere. Many workers rely on temp and day labor agencies just to get by (I've had to use them a couple of times.) There is also not enough in the work force that is affected by these parasitic agencies to garner much sympathy. If they started a movement within the larger trade union movement, there might be some common ground there: one, butting against companies that provide scabs to worksites and two, focusing on employment for everyone. A couple things that might help them, though:

a.) Hire a copyeditor.

b.) Find some way to substantiate the firing-at-89th-day claim, if they can. I have indirectly heard this, as well, but it wasn't ever my experience or the experience of others at the temp agencies I got a job from (also, I am not sure how it works in Canada, but in the United States, many temp agencies start benefits [meaning healthcare] within the first week of working with them. Their clients can choose to keep those people on as temps, or bring them on full-time or part-time, or the agency will bounce them to another work site. If they're part-time, they're not obligated to provide benefits, but the worker still has a job.) Since their movement kind of rests on such a claim, they need to be able to show that it's true beyond anecdotes. It'd be much more potent and powerful a symbol if they can actually show it to be true. Otherwise, they need to go with something else.

But this is a long shot and I see a lot of resistance like we've seen with the $15/hr min. wage fight in the U.S., where people are going to be scared that consumables are going to jump astronomically and people will just end up being laid off instead of being paid the new minimum wage. The movement also, primarily, focused on a section of workers that do not garner much sympathy here: service workers. For propaganda's sake, that was a poor move. Toronto seems to be pretty conservative, and I imagine temp workers get the same kind of shit, so... I mean, good luck on trying to get that support. It'd be great if it happened, but its chances are low.

One thing that has been lacking in the labor movement has been a lack of support for affected workers. Back in the day, unions had funds that would support striking workers -- rent assistance, grocery boxes and what not. That helped a lot in helping convince people that they can strike. With the labor movement as it is nowadays, without that component, people are more concerned with where their paycheck and rent is going to come from -- and it's an understandable fear. I think, kind of at the base of all of this, there needs to be a revitalization of the labor movement generally before we see any major actions taking off, such as this.

[Slavic]

I've been working for the past year as a temp at a pharmaceutical company. You can not get an entry level job in this industry unless you go through a temp agency or have a PhD.

It is my understanding that the host company pays the temp agency the equivilant of their standard base pay rate for your job position. The temp agency then pays you a smaller portion of this base pay rate. The host company pays for your labor in the full amount that they would if you were a full time employee, but they do not have to provide healthcare, sick time, and other benefits which makes hiring temps advantageous.

I have heard of the day 89 firing as well, but have never experienced or seen it happen; except one instance in which an ex was fired on the 90th day due to disability related issues. I don't think companies are apt to "Hire and Fire" temps since training temps eats up a lot of resources.

I'm not sure what to do to organize temps. It would be advantageous to organize around a system of employment as opposed to fields of work since temp work varies and can be fleeting. Its hard being a temp because you get comparetly less pay for your work and there is always the looming threat of lossing your job. Working against host companies where the conditions for firing you are very low is concerning.