Technically, these workers are all temps. They’re hired as temps by the warehouse company, which is contracted to handle temporary staffing by a logistics company. If they make it 90 days, they have the opportunity to become full-blown employees of the logistics company, which means benefits and an extra dollar an hour. It’s been six months since the logistics company graduated someone here from temp to employee status. At one of the other locations Susie manages, no one has been hired as a real employee for two years. One of the workers in this warehouse has been a temp for a year and a half.
After we walked past workers stuffing inflated plastic air pockets in boxes and a guy continuously taping shut the bottom of just-made boxes, we went to Susie’s office. “Hold on, I gotta fire somebody real quick,” she said, picking up the phone. She called a guy who’d been working for her for two months. She was sorry, she told him, but she had to let him go because one of the supervisors had caught him talking on the floor. The man, who she guessed is in his late 40s or early 50s, protested that he had only asked a new guy where he was from. That’s just not the culture, Susie told him. You know the rules. The logistics company sets them, and she has no choice but to enforce them.
Given that I recently polished off The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, this sounds awfully familiar. What wonderful progress we’ve made over the last 100 years…
There are laws that forbid using contractors in the place of full time employees as a way to avoid paying benefits. At my first company, in my first management job, I had a technician working in the lab as a contractor. She did exactly what a full time technician did, and she had been doing it for months. She actually preferred being a contractor, for some convoluted reasons that never made sense to me, so my predecessor left her in that status. But even though she liked it that way, we had an audit by some OSHA or federal function, and the company was hit with a pretty big fine for using her as a full time employee but in a contractor role.
I’m guessing that this company gets away with it by using the 90 day dodge, but if someone has been in that role for 1.5 years, someone needs to get the correct agencies on their ass.
That is messed up. I hate how “temps” are treated in the work force. Worked as a temp/contractor once doing data storage overnight, and once the time passed for them to make me a full time worker passed, I left. Nowadays when I see friends going in as temps I’m always a little sad. Don’t think I’ve ever really seen a temp go to full-hire.
I was a full-time contractor for years, as were most of the people I was working with. Interesting to see that not only were we getting screwed, but we were getting screwed illegally.
They did eventually hire me full time though. And then eventually went out of business. So I don’t begrudge it that much, since they apparently actually did need the money they weren’t paying me.
Indeed, it does say in the new-temp handout that there is no talking allowed on the warehouse floor. Also, there are no cell phones allowed. Like a high school teacher, Susie had a pile of phones she’d confiscated in a plastic bowl on her desk. Two sick days are allotted per year, and they must be excused; after that, the temp is terminated, doctor’s note or no. Every temp is allowed one 30-minute break per day, and it must be taken in the break room. Every temp is required to have an ID badge. The cost of this badge is deducted from the temp’s first paycheck, and is more than an hour’s worth of wages.
Taking away cell phones is standard practice at all sorts of companies. At ExxonMobil, I technically wasn’t allowed to have a phone with a camera in it, which, when I went to get a new phone, would basically have been I can’t have a phone. I just didn’t make a big deal about it and, you know, didn’t steal any company property, but incoming guests would probably have to dump theirs in a bowl.
Breaks in the break room for a working factory floor isn’t entirely unreasonable either. The work area is for working and the break area is for breaking. Which makes it sound like they should hold battle dancing competitions in there, but I imagine that also has to be a firing offense.
The medical leave stuff is a little weird - I would have thought that it would violate the FMLA.
The problem, though, is that there are still hella people who want these jobs. These terrible jobs are better than the alternative in that part of Ohio, apparently. This isn’t a sign that unions need to exist - all that would happen if the employees formed a union is that the company would go hire some of the thousands of other people who would rather have a shitty job than no job at all. What it is a sign of is that the economics of existing in that particular part of the world right now are terrible, and it might be an indication that it would be a pretty good place to start sending government aid, if we were Franklin Roosevelt. Though, given the fact that this is Ohio that we’re talking about, I kind of wonder if they’d take it, based on their general performance in the Republican primaries every year.
The cell phone thing isn’t too odd, although the place I worked at with a strict no-phone policy had lockers to put them in. If you got caught with one it was an immediate disciplinary action and you were told to go lock it up. Handing it over to the manager to put into a big box or bowl seems like a dumb policy. Aside from the real risk of theft, you’d have no way to dispute false claims of such. This place just sounds like they want to discourage phone calls and other distractions.
I have no issue with the breakroom rule.
The medical leave stinginess, no talking, and making people pay for their own badges sucks. Hard. The added “bonus” of never leaving temp status is a special brand of shitty.
I know you take what you can get when you’re desperate, but I’d think about moving before going to this hole.
Lots of possible reasons why. They don’t know it’s illegal. They don’t know how to file a complaint. They’re too busy looking for more work. They’re scared of potential bad references.
