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Abstract

Among workers in United States, contingent and temporary work arrangements have grown to represent a substantial segment of available jobs, with spikes in their predominance corresponding to major economic shake ups like the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. These arrangements are part of a larger trend of the “fissuring” of United States employment, wherein applicants are hired by one company and then sent to do their job at another, obscuring who actually employs the worker. Jobs through temp staffing agencies are a particularly dominant form of fissuring among low-wage workers and create conditions under which accountability for workplace abuses is exceedingly difficult.

Using studies of the temp staffing industry, staffing agency promotional materials, documents from temp staffing litigation, and insights from worker advocates, this Article identifies and confronts patterns of worker exploitation in the temp industry. Specifically, the Article asserts that three groups with presumably disparate experiences-immigrants without work authorization, people with criminal records, and minors who are too young to work legally-are all locked into "permatemping," or unending temporary positions and attendant exploitation at their jobs.

The Article examines how worker vulnerabilities related to workers' identities create conditions for permatemping and evaluates the role of legislatures, labor agencies, and courts in addressing temp worker exploitation. The Article concludes that bars to hire in permanent positions among temp workers is one root cause of existing harms, proposing expansion of existing policy programs and adoption of improvements to systems of accountability for the temp industry as possible remedies.

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