Suchergebnisse

The spread of non-standard employment (NSE) is widely considered to have contributed to the deterioration of labor standards. Yet, in the United States, there is no definitive roster of non-standard work arrangements and no reliable estimate of the size of the non-standard workforce. For over 25 years, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has produced artificially low estimates of employers' use of 'alternative employment arrangements'. Its 2018 Contingent Work Supplement (CWS) reported that since 1995 the proportion of US workers in these arrangements had declined. This article proposes a more systematic framework for understanding NSE in the United States and fleshes out a more comprehensive typology better suited toward addressing the needs of policymakers and labor activists. It fundamentally reorients the study of NSE by recognizing that so-called 'alternative' arrangements are abusive and more aptly understood as degraded work arrangements (DWAs). The article then explores the key categories of DWAs and provides a deeper analysis of one group, dissociative arrangements, that enable the flourishing use of 'non-employee' workers. Concluding sections address the undertheorized state of this subject area and the challenge of union organizing in fractured labor markets.

Based on a historical study of fee regulation in the employment agency business, the claim that temporary help agencies charge "no fees" to workers is challenged. It is found that the claim rests on technical changes in the statutory definitions of fee and employment agency won through industry lobbying efforts, changes that simply mask traditional fee-charging methods. The article traces the evolution of fee-charging practices in the post-World War II period and points to a new version of "fee splitting" as a prevalent wage setting practice in the staffing industry. The implications of these developments for wage depression and income redistribution are explored.

Historical and legal research challenges the staffing industry's claim that it charges "no fees" to workers, and provides scholarly support for the spreading "right‐to‐know" movement among temps and contract workers for the disclosure of hidden, and often exorbitant, agency markups.

This article reports on preliminary research concerning temp agency workers in the logistics hub that serves the Port of Newark/Elizabeth. Our objective is to explore the potential for organizing temporary workers in this industry, and the viability of the hiring hall model in particular. The first section describes several aspects of the regional labor market in which temp agency workers are recruited for the inland warehouses and distribution centers. The second section explores the history and legality of hiring halls, and why this organizing model has in recent decades faded into disuse. The third section sets forth an exploratory plan for organizing the temporary workforce in New Jersey's logistics industry.

This article presents a historical and legal argument for reclassifying and regulating commercial staffing agencies as labor market intermediaries. Their current legal classification as employers is a major factor contributing to the exploitation of temps. The article contrasts the deregulated environment for commercial staffing agencies with the extensive federal regulation of union hiring halls. Because these two institutions serve a similar function—providing access to the job market for short‐term employees—both should be subject to comparable regulatory regimes in order to restore parity in the legal treatment of temporary employees by all parties to the employment relationship. A regulatory regime should impose on temporary help and staffing agencies a level of transparency and fiduciary obligations analogous to the duty of fair representation imposed on union hiring halls by federal labor law. Absent such legal reclassification, the staffing industry will remain unfairly privileged in the marketplace in a way that prevents fair treatment and representation for temps.