(New Jersey): A new report released today, “Essential and Unprotected: Temporary workers in New Jersey ” profiles workers employed in essential jobs through temp or staffing agencies in New Jersey.  The report, compiled by Make the Road NJ and New Labor, highlights workers’ stories of abuse, wage theft, age discrimination, and unsafe work conditions that hundreds of thousands of predominantly Black and Latinx temporary workers faced while working in essential, frontline jobs during the pandemic across New Jersey.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 127,000 workers are employed by temporary or staffing agencies. These temporary agencies serve the logistics corridor up and down I-95 by employing workers in warehouses to unpack shipped goods and repackage them for consumers. Currently, temp workers are pushing for passage of a temp workers Bill of rights to provide key protections,  such as ensuring equal compensations, providing more transparency, eliminating excessive fees, and instituting anti-retaliation measures.

The report is based on interviews with dozens of workers  employed by temp agencies in the warehouse and logistics and manufacturing sector  in New Jersey conducted between 2020 and 2022.

“One agency sent me to work in a warehouse where they didn’t pay us overtime. When we worked more than 50 hours a week, each hour was just a regular rate, not time and a half.” said Vicente R., who has  been working for temporary agencies for more than 16 years and is one of the workers profiled in the report 

“The agencies don’t care if we don’t get paid. They do not tell us how much they are going to pay us and we do not even know the name of the warehouses we are going to work for. We only know them as “candies,” “panties,” “pills,” “tires,” or “perfumes,” Eldipia G., one of the workers profiled in the report, said. “They force us to use their vans which are terrible. They are crowded, and the driver disrespects us and drops us off in places far from our homes. When we complain, the agency no longer sends us work because they say we are problematic. That is not the case. We only demand respect, fair wages, and good working conditions.”

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