The actual law states that you cannot have a temp/contractor doing the same job that you have full time employees doing; the test is the job description. The loophole is that you can hire someone with a predefined short term limit on the job. So, I can’t have a lab tech who is a contractor working side by side with another lab tech who is a full time employee, doing the same job, for any extended period of time. I CAN hire a contractor into the lab tech role if it is explicitly defined as temporary (and temporary can’t be, e.g. a couple of years.) So, for example, if we need an extra tech to help us get through a one time high intensity project that requires a night shift, but know that the project will only last 3 months and then there will be no need for that job, we can hire a contractor. But we can’t then keep her/him on for a year or some indefinite time as a contractor doing the same lab tech work as others who are full time. The one we got caught and punished for, she was in the lab, indistinguishable in her job as the full time lab techs, working full time, and had been there for a couple of year.
There may be exceptions to the law that I am unaware of, but I know in my current role HR always grills us pretty hard when we do hire a contractor, in order to make sure we’re on the right side of the law.
I think the issue is that the agencies are underfunded and understaffed - even if they are informed of a problem it can take a while for them to get to it.
iirc, you need to work someplace for 12 months/1200 some-odd hours for FMLA to kick in. In other words, 99% of temps won’t get it.
I honestly don’t think there’s much if anything actually illegal going at the company in question, but that the reporter is putting the information out there as perhaps something that should be legislated against to make it illegal. It sure as heck isn’t ethical or fair for the workers, and I’d be completely behind a law banning the practice although I suspect such a law would have the unintended consequences of putting more people out of work.
I’ve worked with a number of contractors at my company (and was one myself before I went full time) - the reasons they typically want to stay as contractors are:
Contractors usually have higher take home pay then Full Time Employees, at the cost of having to get benefits on their own and not having paid vacations/sick days.
Not having to deal with company politics, performance reviews, etc.
It doesn’t make sense to me either. The contractors we’re discussing are vastly different than what is talked about in the article though.
The sick day thing sounds like the exact same policy I had to enforce when I was a supervisor at a call center. It sucked.
I don’t think this is true. Under the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act), once a workplace is unionised, the employer simply can’t terminate the unionised employees in favor of non-unionised employees. This is why employers fight so hard to resist unionisation drives- once the union is in, the employer can’t unilaterally push the union out. The fact that the employer would prefer to hire lower-paid, non-unionised workers, and the fact that there are willing replacements for the unionised workers, is irrelevant.
It seems to me that this is what always happens anymore. The government implements rules to try to make corporations play fair and they bend the rules to the breaking point so that execs can pad their paychecks and bonuses a few more percent.
Sometimes it feels like we’re living in 1811 instead of 2011.
At the same time, there are some really thorny problems here. Clearly there are a lot of IT contractors out there making six figures…they probably don’t need the same protections as these warehouse workers.
I want to say that the rules should be stricter the less you pay somebody but I’m sure that the Vice Presidents of Greed and Abuse at all these companies would find some loophole that had them paying you 100k but then charging you $200 bucks every time you used the bathroom with a mandatory minimum two pisses per day.
This is true, but it is also immaterial. What the employer can (and probably should, if we’re talking about the good of all, because this is the method by which costs are held down and people get to cast votes with their dollars - it’s the business’s job to try to find the best deal it can, and if they can find a better deal than the union is offering them, I don’t think we can legitimately fault them for taking it) do is refuse to meet any of the union’s demands. What are they going to do? Go on strike? Well, then I’ll just hire these scabs who are just as happy to do the job for the terms that we set before. A union emerging in this case is helpful for nobody unless we make one of a few assumptions:
The government forces the business to negotiate with the union (in which case I would argue that you’re better off just setting and enforcing workplace standards);
Every potential employee in the area decides to join the union (which, in debate terms, is an abuse of fiat, and in practical terms is pretty unlikely to happen spontaneously); or
The union is allowed to forcibly bar their competitors in the labor market from doing business with the employer (which I personally consider morally abhorrent - if you’re against Coke sending goons to the supermarket to club the Pepsi delivery guy to death, that’s the same thing).
The only case where the unionization scenario works is 2, and we’re pretty obviously not at that point yet, or there wouldn’t be thousands of people still trying to get jobs at that particular factory, unless there’s some kind of massive disinformation campaign that’s keeping all the people getting fired for stupid crap from there from grousing to the public at large about it.
The reality of the situation is that that factory, shitty as it may be, is the best of all available options for all of the people that work there. I’m not worried about the factory - I’m worried about the fact that everything obviously sucks so much in the area that people are competing for the privilege to work at a place like this. That’s not a problem you can solve by trying to make that specific factory better, because eventually you reach the point where it’s worth the money to move your operations and then nobody has any jobs at all (you can try to fix it by affecting global working standards, and for something as regionally localized as shipping doing so on a national scale through OSHA regulation might work, but for a lot of stuff, and maybe even this shipping, the global market makes it a non-starter). It’s a situation you fix by diverting aid to the affected area, such that the people who live there feel better able to tell this particular employer to go screw. Barring a new TVA-style government employment effort, though, I’m not sure how we do that.
The only case where the unionization scenario works is 2, and we’re pretty obviously not at that point yet, or there wouldn’t be thousands of people still trying to get jobs at that particular factory, unless there’s some kind of massive disinformation campaign that’s keeping all the people getting fired for stupid crap from there from grousing to the public at large about it.
What if the unions for the companies that work with the factory decide that solidarity is the word of the day?
For that matter, what makes your reasoning inapplicable to the Gilded Age when unions were first getting started? All of your statements apply just fine to those days…
The only case where the unionization scenario works is 2, and we’re pretty obviously not at that point yet, or there wouldn’t be thousands of people still trying to get jobs at that particular factory, unless there’s some kind of massive disinformation campaign that’s keeping all the people getting fired for stupid crap from there from grousing to the public at large about it.
What if the unions for the companies that work with the factory decide that solidarity is the word of the day?
For that matter, what makes your reasoning inapplicable to the Gilded Age when unions were first getting started? All of your statements apply just fine to those days…
There are thousands of jobs where people are treated in a similar manner across the country. I’ve written a little about how miserable canvassing is as a job – at will firing, “part time”, sub minimum wage, zero rights, termination if unionization is discussed (aha, illegal? so what, you think sub min wage people can afford to hire a lawyer and cause a stink? get real) work outdoors in all weather conditions (below freezing, snow everywhere, we were door to door anyway, same with 100+ heat wave), benefits never.
It’s miserable, and has a lot to do with the way we provide healthcare in this country. Right now, giving someone benefits damn near doubles their cost to the company without providing a similar jump in remuneration to the employee. That shit is bonkers! It also gives employers an incentive to stick people into perma part time positions (where part time is defined as 35hrs or fewer a week, with full time a mere five hours more than that…) or utilize temp labor in ft positions.
A single payer system would move a lot of the costs of employment onto the taxpayer and provide people with more freedom of movement and ability to ditch shitty employers without dying from lack of healthcare. Would also mean we could ditch most of the shitty work comp system and other parallel insurance mechanisms (old people insurance, poor people insurance, etc). Doesn’t mean we need to ditch private insurance; France has private plans that add features to the public plan rather than an NHS system.
A better labor complaint system would be nice, but the best way to deal with shit employers is providing people with free and accessible training, easy mobility and easily accessed unemployment (of reasonable duration) provided by a national rather than a state system, so that people can give a bad employer the finger and up sticks to elsewhere without much effort.
That’s how you get rid of poor treatment by employers, not by unionizing and creating a closed shop. That road leads to discrimination against young people of the sort seen in France, Spain, Greece, Portugal and many other countries.
No. This is a sign that we need to make it easier for people to move. Throwing money at benighted shitholes is a terrible plan. Instead of giving those people an opportunity to get on their feet, it locks them into employment with folks who are entirely dependent on government money to remain standing. Then the money gets wasted on silly stuff and the people get stuck in dead end jobs until the cash gets cut in the next round of budgetary freakout at which point their jobs disappear and they are worse off than before.
Instead they should be offered training, assistance in selling their homes and moving, and easy access to government supported job registries or SBA advisers so that they can start their own company.
Most of these programs already exists. The problem is the lack of funding and the lack of public awareness of said programs. The SBA was a fabulous resource with experienced advisers who helped me out a bunch when starting my own thing. When I was stuck in the unemployment cycle I was constantly stalking the state registry of jobs. I haven’t taken advantage of gov’t training, but I hear that they are great at getting people help with their resumes and interviews. Lack of funding is the big hurdle.
It is troubling that jobs in the area of this place are so few that people are willing to put up with this crap. Ideally this would be a self regulating situation: people simply would choose not to work for these people under these circumstances, and they would be forced to change their ways or have no workers. While I am opposed to a lot of current union practices, this certainly is a situation in which a good union might make a difference.
You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, i.e. there is a useful function and place for good temp and contractor agencies and jobs.
I doubt that there are other unions working with the factory in this case, and if there were such and they agreed it would provide additional pressure, but I would question how much pressure it would actually effect and how they would deal with the backlash in the local community over people stepping on their potential jobs.
No global economy. Once you built a factory to make whatever you’re making, you were kind of stuck leaving it where it was, because the comparative cost of shipping the machinery all the way to wherever you want to move to and probably building a new facility to put it in was much greater than they are today.
The Gilded Age didn’t follow my rules. Specifically, the one about letting scabs freely go about their business (or not hiring Pinkerton to bust a union, from the other side), unless you think that unions exclusively used standard-order Jewish mother guilt tactics to convince people that working in standards below the ones the union would like would not be in their best interests.
There are a lot of other differences between then and now that would require a deviation into history, like the distinction in standard of living (i.e. how much of a death sentence was unemployment then versus now), that makes the comparability rough at best.
Lowering the goddamn unemployment rate would be the biggest fix to asinine job stories like this. The US economy never really recovered from the 2000 crash; I blame the Fed’s anti-inflation fetishism holdover from the 1970s.
Germany has very high unionization rates and is an economic powerhouse, unlike those countries. It’s not that clear-cut.
Instead they should be offered training, assistance in selling their homes and moving, and easy access to government supported job registries or SBA advisers so that they can start their own company.
Training, sure. Job-finding assistance only helps if the unemployment rate isn’t sky-high. Moving only helps if things are way better somewhere else, which right now it isn’t.
I would agree with you. Each state has various laws that require a certain requirements are met. Companies can try to avoid laws but eventually some agency will catch up to them. I would tend to believe that if this type of company behavior is limited they will eventually run into problems, if it is widespread eventually the state will adapt to it and restrict it in some way. Now there may be states that don’t give a shit as well.
I would hope when/if the economy truns around companies like this will find staffing a tough thing to do.
The current Ohio govt. won’t do anything about this. If anything, they have encouraged it. Can’t wait for the next election though. We need a new governor in a bad way. Hopefully, everyone else sees that too.
Germany also spent most of a decade dropping wages to rock bottom, and has unions that work hand in glove with management. It also has an education system focused on creating massive numbers of individuals with technical qualifications relevant to businesses. And it’ll take a beating as China moves up the value chain into high quality manufacturing and Germany finds itself without the ability to easily transition into a service and innovation oriented economy.
It is pretty clear cut. Germany is an outlier, not some sort of new normal. When more countries and companies start entering that field, it’ll end up like every other export dependent industrial country has over the past couple decades – stuck with a lot of now useless infrastructure and companies that exist on razor thin margins.
Training, sure. Job-finding assistance only helps if the unemployment rate isn’t sky-high. Moving only helps if things are way better somewhere else, which right now it isn’t.
Job hunting assistance and moving will both help now, even if they aren’t magic bullets. Unemployment isn’t spread evenly across the country; some places are better off than others. When the economy gets back on track they will both be important elements in reducing structural unemployment.
Look at the OECD unionization rates; amusingly France has a lower rate than the US. The list of countries with higher unionization rates than Germany is chock-full of both rich well-performing-for-years states and clusterfuck countries; same for countries with lower. The effects of unions are not immediately clear cut from any data set, and to my knowledge the economic literature doesn’t show anything definitive either.
Job hunting assistance and moving will both help now, even if they aren’t magic bullets.
Job assistance only helps with the employer/employee skill matching problem, which is not a significant contributor to current unemployment. Moving will help some, but I haven’t seen estimates of what the upper bound looks like. It’s certainly nowhere near as powerful as Fed actions.
France does indeed have lower unionization rates than the US. It also has the temp/perm divide that leaves younger workers out of luck. Which is what I’m concerned with; I see unionization as a precipitating factor in heading down that road, but it’s not the only one by any means. Young people are all temps, older folks have jobs with great benefits and zero possibility of being fired. So when a recession rolls around the young are SOL and losing the opportunity to gain experience, while the old folks continue their delightfully inefficient lifestyles and fail to prepare for the days when dependency rates will be such that the young, who haven’t be able to land the cushy gigs, won’t be able to afford maintaining the elderly in the style to which they have become accustomed.
Unions: a possible problem, but as I mentioned wrt Germany one that can be totally irrelevant.
Temp/Perm Young/Old Divide: critical issue
France: Not unionized, very much suffering from temp/perm problem
Job assistance only helps with the employer/employee skill matching problem, which is not a significant contributor to current unemployment. Moving will help some, but I haven’t seen estimates of what the upper bound looks like. It’s certainly nowhere near as powerful as Fed actions.
You’re sort of half and half right with this one.
Structural problems are not the precipitating factor of the current unemployment bonanza, but in good times they are indeed a significant contributor to unemployment. We should deal with them to eliminate that issue, not because we expect it to provide a magic solution to current woes. It will make the job hunt easier for a subset of the population with useful skills in a useless location, and that’s never a bad thing.
What do we need to deal with the current stuff? Nominal growth, a budget cutback that isn’t frontloaded, and some sanity on the part of our politicians. One out of three isn’t that great, but it’s better than zilch I guess.
As far as power relative to Fed actions, well, that’s not something I want to get into.
