By Lulit Shewan

In the United States, the legacy of alternative and temporary work has served to create increasingly unstable jobs that make up a highly visible but often overlooked share of the American workforce. Temporary and staffing agencies are a high-traffic, high-profit industry meant to serve individuals seeking job training for further employment opportunities. These programs largely serve communities of color, low-income Black communities, individuals without postsecondary education, and those who face barriers to “traditional” work. But the temporary staffing industry reveals yet another blatant system of discrimination reminiscent of pre-Civil Rights policies. Temporary staffing agencies create a system of precarious employment that fails to support the work needs of vulnerable groups, while systematically creating vulnerability through poor job conditions, subpar wages, labor exploitation, and racist practices. These agencies are yet another example of how employers and corporations operate at the intersection of profit accumulation and discrimination.

Temp workers are more than twice as likely to be paid poverty wages compared to workers in all industries. These workers are often paid less than their direct-hire counterparts doing the same work. Staffing and temp agencies receive a cut of the hourly fee they charge host employers, which can range from 30 percent to more than 150 percent of the wages the worker receives. Namely, Black women are also overrepresented in occupations that have a disproportionate share of temporary agency workers and are less likely to work in occupations that have a high share of independent contractors or contract workers, as compared to their white counterparts.

An estimated 13 million to 16 million U.S. workers are hired through staffing agencies annually, according to industry estimates. Despite the volume of this industry, U.S. policy poorly enforces the regulation of temp work, and this lack of regulation leaves a wide gap for the largest employers in sectors like warehousing, manufacturing, and increasingly in retail, to use temporary agencies to squeeze more labor from workers. Such poorly regulated programs create new systems of discrimination in poor Black and brown communities, where efficacy and accessibility are deficient.

Among communities of need, employment agencies are also often known to exacerbate the precarity of job programs through misleading information, manipulation, and outright discrimination. The industry is rife with stories of agencies deceiving and often lying about the terms of employment surrounding hours, pay, safety, and the process of temp-to-permanent job trajectory. Many of these agencies operate without a license, send people to jobs that don’t exist, or place them in jobs that don’t pay minimum wage. Oftentimes, these agencies charge a fee to connect individuals to companies with little or poor return. A 2022 NELP study underscoring the systematic manipulation of agencies found that 24 percent of workers reported experiencing wage theft through a staffing agency, in which they were paid less than minimum wage, not paid overtime, or not paid the proper amount for hours they worked. Exaggerating the benefits, salary, or job security of a position is also commonplace across various agencies in several states. Such agencies have also normalized the farcical presentation of temp-to-perm positions, convincing people to work under substandard conditions under the pretense that something better is on the horizon. As of 2022, NELP found that 72 percent of surveyed workers have never been hired into a permanent position from a temp job.

The underbelly of this issue, as is true for all forms of systematic oppression, is racist discrimination. Across various localities and states, a rampant trend of bigotry in hiring serves to further disparage employment opportunities for Black people in need. Many agencies often rely on this discrimination at several points in the recruiting and enlistment process. Stories of this anti-Black discrimination have seen spikes since the inception of the pandemic staffing-agency boom; employers using coded language to request non-Black people for hire, eligibility requirements being illegally skewed, assigning Black applicants to ‘less desirable’ work, or the unmitigated presence of interpersonal racism on the job.

The significant rise of discrimination is a grave concern to the growing temporary workforce that often operates as a lifeline to a very vulnerable workforce, whose threshold for workplace conditions and self-advocacy are greatly skewed due to the precarious nature of this work. Oftentimes, Black workers who attempt to fight back against these discriminatory practices not only fail to see retribution but lose accessibility to this vital work as a whole. It is also important to note that formerly incarcerated individuals are overrepresented in this labor market. These agencies, operating in tandem with employer tax credits, impel workers with criminal records to accept such jobs with low wages and poor working conditions, creating a class of disproportionately Black workers whose desperation employers can exploit.

The poor management and regulation of temporary staffing agencies is yet another facet of a racist workforce system, one that often serves to replicate the poor material conditions that Black laborers, the backbone of this country, have faced since its inception. The truth is clear: these agencies work to serve companies, not workers.

While eliminating barriers in recruitment and hiring and combatting illegal job discrimination are two of six national priorities identified by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, it is glaringly evident that these values are seldom upheld and enforced in the temporary staffing industry.