More than half of temporary workers in Massachusetts didn’t receive overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week, according to a new report released by the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health on Wednesday.
The yearlong study uncovered rampant violations of a state law that went into effect more than a decade ago, including instances of retaliation against workers who challenged working conditions.
Labor advocates with MassCOSH say not enough is being done to enforce worker protections for the hundreds of thousands of temporary workers in Massachusetts. Beyond holding employers accountable for those violations, they also argue that the law needs to be revised to create stricter protections for temporary workers so that, for instance, they’re guaranteed pay and benefits equal to permanent employees.
At Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in East Boston, Francisca Sepulveda, director of the Immigrant Worker Center at MassCOSH, picked up the microphone to introduce the subjects of MassCOSH’s study: 50 temporary workers fired over text on New Year’s Eve without notice, 17 housekeepers in the hotel industry defrauded out of overtime pay and another group of laborers who worked without personal protective equipment during the pandemic.
“Temporary workers do essential work in this state,” Sepulveda said. “For the past years, even though we had legislation enacted in 2013, we were still seeing at our worker center many workers having issues — discrimination issues, safety and health issues, wage issues.”
Staffing agencies act as a middleman between host companies and temporary workers. Heather Rowe, chief of investigations at the fair labor division of the state attorney general’s office, estimates there are more than a thousand temporary staffing agencies registered with the state — and an unquantifiable number of unregistered agencies that more commonly exploit workers.
“We need more temporary staffing agencies to know — and their client businesses to know — that if you cheat your workers out of their wages and out of their workplace rights to gain a competitive advantage for yourselves and for your own wallets, Fair Labor will hold you accountable for the laws that you break,” Rowe said.
The report identified specific gaps in workplace protections and outlined a series of recommendations that aim at forging a future where temporary workers, many of them immigrants, are adequately compensated and don’t fear mistreatment at work.
Advocates hope that staffing agencies will begin creating pathways to permanent employment for “perma-temps,” temporary workers who end up working at one job site for many months or even years, among other reforms that are only achievable through an expansion of the 2013 “Temporary Workers Right to Know” law. The report recommends the state also give workers the right to refuse work at a job site where salaried workers are striking and increase licensing requirements for staffing agencies.
“Our report demonstrates that temporary workers in Massachusetts are not protected by our laws as much as they should and can be,” said Michael Tomase, a law school student who works at the Boston College Law Civil Rights Clinic, which partnered with MassCOSH to produce the study and report. “The time is now to act on these recommendations, to increase knowledge and enforcement of existing temp worker laws and to pass legislation that will require equal pay for equal work for temporary workers.”
Through an interpreter, Mayra Molina, a former temp worker who now works as a paralegal at an immigration relief firm, gave impassioned final remarks before the small audience disbanded: “Sigamos, sigamos presionando.” Let’s continue, continue pressing on.
