Safety expert weighs implications as job market shifts ‘from stability to precariousness’

May 6, 2016 by
Dr. John Howard

Dr. John Howard

The nature of work is changing dramatically, and it’s creating new challenges – and pitfalls – for regulators charged with protecting workers’ health and safety.

The highest-ranking official at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health called on academics gathered Wednesday at the University of Minnesota to dig deep into the implications of emerging economic trends like robotics and agency-based, temporary employment, as well as the potential use of “big data” to make workplaces safer.

“The government built all of our social-protection laws based on an old paradigm,” Dr. John Howard told about 75 professionals gathered at the Midwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety’s annual symposium. With a greater share of the U.S. workforce moving “from stability to precariousness,” he added, “the normal employer-employee relationship has eroded.”

Howard, who also serves as administrator of the World Trade Center Health Program, covered a wide range of issues and referenced a trove of published research in his 45-minute address.

No one knows exactly how many U.S. workers are employed in temporary jobs or other “non-traditional” arrangements, Howard said. But it’s definitely on the rise.

Research shows the 21st-century job market is characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity. Workers increasingly settle for short-term “gigs” rather than career-path jobs. Many find themselves at the mercy of sophisticated, “Just-in-Time” scheduling software that makes their shifts irregular and paychecks unpredictable. Layers of subcontractors and agencies often create murky managerial relationships.

In many ways, the emerging labor market looks increasingly like the construction industry, where tradespeople bounce from jobsite to jobsite and from employer to employer. That means regulators, Howard said, ought to cast a wider net for wage theft, misclassification of workers as “independent contractors” and other violations that plague construction work.

But worker-protection laws written in the mid-20th century aren’t always applicable in the modern age, when any coffee shop with wifi can serve as an office and Google Hangouts can take the place of a conference room. “We really have another definition of a workplace, and it’s a challenging one,” Howard said.

Meanwhile, global trade and automation continue to alter the type of work most Americans do.

It’s generally accepted, Howard said, that 47 percent of existing job categories will be subject to automation in the next two decades. And experts expect about 80 percent of the workforce soon will be employed in service-oriented work – jobs, Howard said, that usually require no more than a high-school degree.

“It may not be possible now to increase productivity through education,” Howard said, acknowledging that such an assertion flies in the face of predictions offered two decades ago by proponents of NAFTA and other free-trade agreements. “Economists are finding out that the benefits of trade don’t necessarily justify its cost,” he added.

Technology is also creating opportunities and challenges when it comes to protecting workers’ health and safety on the job.

Researchers in the field of occupational health are only beginning to understand the potential of new sensory technology that provides a constant stream of data from the jobsite to safety monitors – everything from air quality to the heart rates of workers on a factor floor. The “big struggle,” Howard said, is mining that data for indicators that accidents or other adverse events might be on the horizon.

Finding those indicators could amount to a major breakthrough in worker safety – and a much-needed one as well. Research suggests the changing nature of work – the shift “from stability to precariousness,” as Howard put it – comes with some serious health and safety risks for working people.

Studies suggest temporary workers have shorter life spans than those in career-path positions. Unpredictable work schedules may also be taking a toll on workers’ mental health. And when a patchwork collection of temp agencies and subcontractors provides labor for a single workplace, site-specific safety training is often inconsistent – and sometimes nonexistent.

“Workers have a more distant relationship with the people they work with, the people who can help navigate potential hazards,” Howard said, noting that temporary workers are less likely to report potential hazards – or try using collective action to improve their working conditions.

“They work for a temp agency,” Howard said. “They feel lucky just to have a job.”

Filed Under: Labor Voices Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Panel explores new approaches to building a better economy

May 6, 2014 by
Anne Winkler-Morey holds a picture of Mary Vojtko, the late adjunct professor at Duquesne University whose death last year drew national attention to declining wages, hours and benefits for adjuncts nationwide.

Anne Winkler-Morey holds a picture of Mary Vojtko, the late adjunct professor at Duquesne University whose death last year drew national attention to organizing efforts by adjuncts nationwide.

Cantaré Davunt nodded her head as Anne Winkler-Morey talked about struggling to make ends meet as an adjunct professor. To Davunt, the challenges adjunct faculty face – low wages, unreliable hours, few opportunities for advancement – sounded all too familiar to her experience as an associate at Walmart.

Davunt and Winkler-Morey joined a panel discussion in St. Paul last week that explored new employment trends and offered a glimpse into how seemingly different workers – like college faculty and retail clerks – are waging similar battles to turn their low-wage jobs into middle-class careers.

“I’ve always been a believer that making change, the only way you can do it is by getting your hands dirty,” Davunt said, explaining why she’s become active in OUR Walmart, a growing collection of associates nationwide who are organizing to improve working conditions at the world’s largest retailer.

But it isn’t just retail workers like Davunt who are feeling the squeeze.

Although the economy continues to regain jobs lost during the Great Recession, the bulk of those gains are coming in low-wage industries. According to a report released last month by the National Employment Law Project, there are nearly 2 million fewer jobs in mid- and higher-wage industries nationwide than there were before the recession took hold, while there are 1.85 million more jobs in lower-wage industries.

What’s more, temporary is becoming the new reality for an increasing number of workers forced to settle for part-time or temporary employment. In Minnesota, employment in the economy’s “employment services” sector, which includes subcontractors and temp agencies, is up 42 percent since November 2009. The uptick in temporary hiring, in fact, drew scrutiny from a state legislative committee last year.

Given these employment trends, how can workers expect to make ends meet? That’s the question moderator Michael Kuchta, former editor of The Union Advocate, posed to panelists.

“Not all workers are letting this get shoved down their throats,” said Kuchta, a member of the planning committee for the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library’s “Untold Stories” labor-history series, which sponsored the event April 29 at the St. Paul Labor Centre. “Workers are responding to the changing economy, responding to a middle class that is shrinking.”

Cantaré Davunt, a Walmart associate, borrows adjunct professor Ann Winkler-Morley's visual aids during a panel discussion on low-wage jobs.

Cantaré Davunt, a Walmart associate, borrows adjunct professor Ann Winkler-Morey’s visual aids during a panel discussion on low-wage jobs.

One way is via worker centers, including the Twin Cities-based Centro de Trabajaderos Unidos en Lucha (CTUL), or Center for Workers United in Struggle.

Like most worker centers, CTUL emerged in response to allegations of employer misconduct voiced by members of a distinct community. In CTUL’s case, organizer Ruth Schultz said, the allegations came from Latino workers cleaning big-box retail stores.

Over the last five years, CTUL has broadened its mission from helping individual workers fight wage theft and other employer abuses to the “next level” of building solidarity and working on legislative issues that affect its members, Schultz said.

Currently, CTUL is leading a campaign to hold big-box retailers, particularly Target, responsible for ensuring fair employment practices in their stores. Most workers who clean big-box stores are employed by subcontracting firms, often fly-by-night operations based in other states, making it difficult both to organize workers and to hold employers accountable.

“We’re not a traditional union, where there is one employer,” Schultz explained. “CTUL is really in the leadership of where worker centers are going, in looking at how we raise the wage floor – not only for our members, but for all low-wage workers.”

The recent – and successful – campaign to raise the state’s minimum wage saw CTUL working hand in hand with another group reaching out to non-union workers in Minnesota, Working America.

Although more broad in its approach than CTUL, Working America is another way workers are pushing back against recent employment trends. Backed by the nation’s largest labor federation, the AFL-CIO, Working America sponsors door-to-door canvassing in neighborhoods across the state, signing up members, polling workers about the issues that matter to them and building grassroots campaigns around the results.

Minimum wage was one of those issues, said Brianna Halverson, Working America’s statewide director. Now, with victory secured, the group is building a new campaign to ensure all workers have access to earned sick time.

“We’re constantly hearing stories from our members about the imbalance of work life and home life,” Halverson said. “We heard that even if a workplace had paid time off or some other policy, people felt like it was frowned upon to actually use it. That’s why we’re working on a campaign right now around the issue, and we’re hoping to move it next year at the Capitol.”

Of course, Working America and worker centers like CTUL are not meant to supplant traditional unions, but to fill in the gaps in industries or employment models – subcontracting, temp agencies – where organizing is particularly difficult.

Workers, including adjunct professors like Winkler-Morey, still look to unions as a way to gain a voice on the job and bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions. Adjuncts at Hamline University and contingent faculty at Macalester College filed for union elections last month.

Winkler-Morey, who teaches primarily at Metro State University, hopes it’s a vote she gets to take someday. Already, she’s seen her “middle-class profession become a low-wage profession,” as the share of adjunct faculty – professors on the “poverty track” instead of the tenure track, she quipped – at colleges and universities has increased from 25 to 75 percent during her career.

“It’s a mystery,” Winkler-Morey said. “Why is tuition going up and up and up, and class sizes are going up and up and up, and the number of low-wage instructors is going up? What’s happened?”

history-tour

The panel discussion on low-wage organizing was part of “Untold Stories,” presented annually by The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library. Click the image for more information on the labor-history series.

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Legislative committee investigates higher levels of temp-agency employment

December 23, 2013 by
Enrique Barcenas, pictured while speaking at a Black Friday march in St. Paul, testified before the Legislature's Select Committee on Living Wage jobs.

Enrique Barcenas, pictured while speaking at a Black Friday march in St. Paul, testified before the Legislature’s Select Committee on Living Wage jobs.

Minnesota’s economy continues to recover from the Great Recession, but an increasing number of workers are finding employment through temp agencies and subcontracting firms. That trend drew scrutiny from the Legislature’s Select Committee on Living Wage Jobs at a hearing Dec. 19 in St. Paul.

Jobs in the economy’s “employment services” sector, which includes subcontractors and temp agencies, is up 42 percent since November 2009, Steve Hine of the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development told lawmakers on the committee, chaired by DFL Rep. Ryan Winkler of Golden Valley.

Temporary work is known to be cyclical, dropping off at the start of economic downturns and picking up at the beginning of recoveries. But Hine also attributed the increase in temporary jobs to “an outsourcing of many business services … that used to be done in-house.”

Staffing agencies and subcontractors enable businesses to outsource everything from maintenance to human resources, shifting the legal responsibilities of employment onto the subcontractor.

Owners of staffing firms and temp agencies claim their business attract workers looking for experience, flexibility or a foot in the door to a new career.

But those benefits come at a steep price for workers and the state, according to Jessica Webster, an attorney with Legal Aid who has represented temps in unemployment-insurance cases.

Webster said the temp-agency industry has a “carve-out” in Minnesota law that makes it difficult for their workers to qualify for unemployment benefits. Even when temps are legally eligible for unemployment, Webster said, agencies fight unemployment claims at an inordinate rate, compared to other employers.

That creates an extra burden on state administrators who process workers’ appeals, she said, but unemployment appeals aren’t the only burden the recent explosion of temp work has created for government agencies.

As agencies compete to provide staffing for businesses at lower costs, it depresses the wages they are able to pay. Many temp workers, Webster added, rely on public assistance to support themselves or their families.

“We see them on our SNAP, we see them accessing child-care dollars in Minnesota, we see them accessing (public) health care,” Webster said. “They are a cost to Minnesota in many ways.”

The “race to the bottom” benefits only those at the top, said Enrique Barcenas, who works for Prestige Maintenance, one of several cleaning contractors retained by Target in the Twin Cities.

“I don’t need to be a big business owner to understand the policy they use,” Barcenas told lawmakers through a translator. “If I see someone is going to charge less, I’m obviously going to contract with them, and then the people who work are making less.

“The only people who benefit are the ones at the top, and maybe in the middle, but the ones at the bottom, they get stepped on.”

By the very nature of their employment conditions, temp workers are difficult to organize, but the Greater Minnesota Worker Center, a community-based coalition that supports low-wage workers in the St. Cloud area, has had some success.

Stephen Philion, chair of the Worker Center and a sociology professor at St. Cloud State, told lawmakers that temp workers, backed by community leaders supportive of the Worker Center, approached management at a Jennie-O turkey-processing plant in the area and asked them to drop its relationship with a temp agency and hire workers directly.

Jennie-O agreed, and workers at the plant, Philion said, report a “very real and very dramatic” improvement.

By linking workers with labor unions, nonprofit charities and faith communities, worker centers put employers on notice that temp workers “are part of a broader community that is concerned about their fate and sees their fate tied in with the broader community’s ability to experience economic development,” Philion added.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , ,