Temporary insanity, continued

by Kristen Lombardi

This growth is rooted in a fundamental shift in the structure of corporate America. George Gonos, a SUNY Potsdam employment-relations professor who studies temp work, notes that many businesses reorganized in the 1970s, cutting core work forces -- full-time employees with costly benefits -- to become a "shell of a company." As a result, employers outsource even daily tasks such as bookkeeping, data entry, and grounds maintenance.

Temp workers may want full-time, salaried positions -- with all their perks -- but those are much harder to find than the low unemployment rate suggests. That's why coalitions like CCW and NAFFE want to make temp work itself a better deal. NAFFE, a still-evolving alliance of 35 organizations including temps in Rhode Island, day laborers in Chicago, contract engineers in Seattle, and the AFL-CIO in Washington, DC, has a four-point platform for change:

* Organize contingent workers into existing unions so they can protect themselves.

* Press for state and federal legislation that would correct inequities in pay, benefits, and conditions between contingent and permanent workers.

* Push for government regulation of "nonstandard" jobs to give these workers more clout.

* Persuade temp agencies to adopt ethical codes that safeguard temps.

As Marcus Courtney, a NAFFE spokesperson from Seattle, explains: "Every day, workers see themselves left out of this great economic boom. But now they're banding together to fight for what they deserve."

JASON PRAMAS took his first temp job at age 19. His most memorable? Operating a forklift after watching a 15-minute instructional video.

For 16 painfully long years, Jason Pramas, 33, a squat, spirited Cambridge resident, could have starred as the disgruntled temp in a Hollywood movie. After being expelled from Boston University for building a campus shantytown to protest the school's investment in South Africa during apartheid, Pramas, then 19, accepted a job as an office temp, stuffing envelopes for a faceless organization. It wound up being the first of many jobs that had him, he says, "stuck trying to keep my head above water."

Pramas cannot forget the time he went to work as a temporary laborer at a Vermont wire factory. Upon his arrival, he was trained in the delicate task of operating a forklift by watching a 15-minute video. Later, while lifting a one-ton bale of wiring, Pramas twisted his neck. He heard the snap, he felt the pain. But because he lacked health benefits, he was sent home from the hospital with nothing but ibuprofen. His injury -- a dislocated vertebra -- causes pain to this day.

Tom Sullivan, 50, a Quincy resident who doesn't fit the Gen-X, slacker-temp mold, found himself stuck in a similar rut for 10 years. The experience, he says, taught him what it feels like to be "a commodity." He labored for months at companies with the false promise of being hired permanently. He missed days' worth of pay because assignments ended abruptly.

Even when he had temp-agency perks, Sullivan endured a tenuous lifestyle. Once he was forced to take two weeks off without pay because he needed surgery. The agency assured him that his job would be safe. But when he returned, he lost his job and his medical coverage. "You're treated like cattle," he says, "it's sickening."

Nearly every business nowadays relies on workers like Pramas and Sullivan. Edward Lenz, the senior vice-president of the American Staffing Association, which represents 1400 temp agencies nationwide, says that companies use temps and other contingents to manage "more flexibly." Some depend on temps during seasonal peaks like Christmas. Others contract out tasks that aren't considered essential. An American Management Association survey found that 91 percent of companies hire contingents for "flexibility purposes," while 63 percent do so because of "payroll reduction."

These goals sound rational. Yet Gonos, the SUNY professor, points out that this reliance on contingent labor has created a "secondary labor market," in which whole groups of workers are treated unfairly. "Contingents hear about the great economy," he adds, "and know billionaires have gotten rich because they're underpaid."

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Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com.