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Bill to improve conditions for NJ’s temp workers up for final vote (again)
By
Karen Yi
Published Aug 5, 2022
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Kmatta via Getty Images
By
Karen Yi
Published Aug 5, 2022
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The New Jersey Senate will convene for a rare August session Monday to again vote on a bill protecting temporary workers from abusive employers.
The measure passed both chambers of the Legislature in June, but due to a clerical error, the Senate voted on an iteration of the measure that didn’t match the version in the Assembly.
Immigrant groups and labor advocates initially celebrated the bill’s passage, but said they looked forward to the bill finally reaching the governor’s desk.
“If it takes a day, a month, a year, we're still gonna keep fighting to make sure there's other tools that can help workers improve their working conditions,” Lou Kimmel, executive director of worker advocacy nonprofit New Labor, said.
He said the warehouse industry is increasingly relying on cheap labor to fuel its growth — at the expense of temp workers, who are often undocumented immigrants or formerly incarcerated individuals employed by temp agencies that supply daily labor to multiple work sites.
“It's convenient a lot of times in supply chains because it pushes down the responsibility. So at the top you might have a multinational corporation, like an Amazon or a Walmart, but they're not the employer because they've pushed those responsibilities on down the chain,” Kimmel said.
That’s where the state’s 127,000 temp workers “get stuck in this Wild West, where there's lack of regulation,” he said. These workers make up about a quarter of the state’s warehouse labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The bill, called the Temp Workers’ Bill of Rights, requires temp agencies to tell their workers what they are getting paid, where they will work, and the name of the temp agency. Some of these agencies operate out of nameless, nondescript buildings or don’t include their names on the paychecks they hand workers, making it difficult to file any formal complaint with state regulators, workers say.
“We're not giving anybody the golden ticket here,” Democratic State Sen. Joe Cryan, who sponsored the bill, told Gothamist. “All we're doing is asking for basic worker protections that, I think, are frankly a common principle in New Jersey.”
While more than 300 staffing agencies are listed by the state, Gothamist reported in 2020 that not all are registered as required by law. The new bill would fine an agency $5,000 for every day it operates without being registered.
Another provision would stop temp agencies from charging temp workers for rides to and from work sites, which Kimmel estimates costs $2,000 a year, and often means workers don’t earn minimum wage after accounting for those deductions. Temp agencies will also have to itemize any paycheck deductions.
Temp workers are also often in vans stuffed beyond capacity limits — even during the pandemic. The bill specifically lays out a maximum allowance of one seat and one seatbelt per person.
The New Jersey Staffing Alliance warned that the bill would jeopardize jobs by discouraging companies from using temp workers due to the new state requirements.
“Many sections of this bill put unnecessary burden onto staffing agencies, while other industries in the state do not have to adhere to these types of guidelines. The over 1,000 staffing agencies in the Garden State deserve better than this,” the group said in an emailed statement.
The American Staffing Association has not yet responded to a request for comment on the bill emailed on Thursday afternoon.
This story has been updated to include comment from the New Jersey Staffing Alliance.
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Karen Yi
Karen Yi covers homelessness and poverty. She joined the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom in 2020. Before that, Karen covered Newark for the Star-Ledger and spent almost a decade working for newspapers in New Jersey and Florida. She grew up in Miami and has a dog named Cashew. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 917-589-1460.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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