The names of all temporary workers in this story have been changed.
A white woman–like me–with gray hair, wearing a Granny Smith-green shirt and matching bauble earrings, smiles and beckons me to the newly emptied chair beside her. She begins to talk the moment I sit down, noting that I’m new, and explaining that she’s been working through Ready-Men for a few months. A dispatcher behind a service counter calls out a series of names of people assigned to a day of work. Some women cluster around to grab their papers, or “tickets,” from him and then shuffle out the door, laughing quietly and chatting in Spanish. My neighbor leans toward me and mutters, “They go out every day–even the new ones. It’s not fair. They don’t belong in this country.”
For example, the practice of “just in time” inventory replacement has gained popularity with mass merchandisers like Wal-Mart, increasing the demand for a fluctuating work force. Under this system, a store stocks only the merchandise displayed on its shelves and tracks sales with bar codes that signal regional headquarters to reorder products just before they sell out. The practice has profoundly affected production of consumer goods, Theodore says. “They tell their suppliers, ‘We’re not sure exactly how much we’re going to need, but when we decide, we’re gonna need the stuff right away.’ Then that firm doesn’t know exactly how much it’s gonna produce, so it doesn’t know how many people it’s gonna need, so it says to its work force, ‘We’re not sure how many hours we’re gonna need you.’”
The temporary industry does meet some reasonable needs of employers–to fill jobs left vacant by permanent workers on injury or maternity leave, for example. And temporary hiring halls can serve as a port of entry for people joining the American labor force for the first time or after a long absence. “Let’s say someone doesn’t have great language skills–they’re from another country or something,” Theodore says. “They don’t have a good job-searching network. They go to the day-labor place, now the employer knows how to find them.” In theory, they can then prove their mettle and move into permanent, better-paying jobs. But in practice, Theodore says, “for a large segment of the low end of the work force, people are going to be bouncing around from unemployment to temporary work, back to unemployment, to part-time jobs, can’t make it, back to unemployment, in and out of this contingent labor.”
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She told the dispatcher that if she doesn’t get work soon, she’ll have no choice but to file for unemployment compensation from a job she held through the agency for a year, then lost shortly before she decided to stay home with her grandson. “They might fight it for a couple months, but you get it,” she says. “But then they get real funky with you. They won’t send you out, and when the unemployment runs out you’re really messed up.”
Marvin, a 34-year-old African-American man, walks with us down Broadway, punctuating Olyvia’s diatribe with sympathetic murmurs. He joined the military after he graduated from high school in 1981, returned from duty in 1985, and took his first job with Ready-Men two years later, making household cleaners at a factory in Niles. “When I started out at Ready-Men I was making $3.35 an hour, and I thought I was rich then,” Marvin says. In 1988, he says, he had been working for more than three months on a Ready-Men ticket making Weber grills in Palatine when the company announced it was planning to hire six or seven Ready-Men workers, including Marvin. “Ready-Men found out and they canceled the whole contract,” Marvin claims.
In fact, there are very few laws that specifically address temporary labor. In 1971, federal legislators failed to pass a Day Labor Protection Act; attempts to regulate daily-pay agencies at the state and city levels also failed in the early 70s. In 1974, a Chicago ordinance sponsored by 46th Ward alderman Chris Cohen outlawed the common practice of paying day laborers with vouchers that could only be cashed at taverns owned by agency bosses or their friends.
