Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [10]
As I was finishing the last bite of my morning meal, a guy walked in and shouted, “Who wants to work? Van’s outside!”
Well, you didn’t have to ask me twice. That’s what I was there for. I asked Ann if it would be possible for me to skip out on orientation and postpone my tuberculosis (TB) test until the next day. I wanted to work. Impressed by my vigor, she sent me out the door with my promise that I would attend orientation the following day.
I hopped in the van marked “EasyLabor: Work Today, Pay Today,” and we were off. I was almost certain that this was one of the labor agencies that Sarge had warned me against, but I didn’t take the time to do any investigating. Even with unfavorable wages, “work today, pay today” sounded very appealing.
The driver swung us around onto Huger Street and down King. We arrived at a small white-brick building branded with the same sign as the side of the van. The twelve of us who had crammed in the van emptied out like clowns spilling out of a tiny car at a circus and into the building to see what type of work was being offered. The large front room was bordered with chairs and a table in the middle. A pot of old coffee sat on the table untouched. As a new worker, I was required to fill out a form that struck me as less of an application than a data sheet petitioning my essential information—name, address, telephone number, social security number. I had two of the four. I inquired about the shelter information with another guy, but he said that none of that mattered. “Just write down whatever. They’re not gonna contact you.”
Blue-collar, temporary labor agencies, as I was going to find out over the course of the next week, are the pit of the employment industry. One might assume that they are out to create a mutually beneficial joining of their clientele—the employee to the employer and vice versa—but that was not my experience at all. For unskilled labor, EasyLabor receives a set price from a patron—generally around $10 an hour per worker—and they in turn send the patron as many workers as they need. These can be for any variety of second-rate jobs, ranging from construction cleanup to landscape maintenance and washing windows to more skilled labor involving framing houses and masonry. And the work is not limited to organizations that happen to be short on labor for the time being. Anybody can order workers from the labor agency if they need help with monotonous chores around the house or heavy lifting or whatever.
In return, we (the workers) get a raw deal. We don’t receive anywhere close to $10 per hour. The average pay for unskilled jobs at EasyLabor is between $6 and $6.75 per hour, but after taxes and a one-dollar check processing fee and this fee and that fee, workers usually walk away with $4.50 tops. Forget benefits or any other perks. The operation is advantageous to both the patron (they get rather inexpensive labor, and they don’t have to worry about insurance and other miscellaneous costs) and EasyLabor (they get a fat chunk of the action), but the worker—just as Sergeant Mendoza had suggested—gets screwed.
The kicker is that there’s always a surplus of labor. Walk into any blue-collar labor agency in Charleston at around 9:00 A.M., and you’ll see an assembly of people who didn’t get sent out for the day. The attraction of just showing up and working and getting cash at the end of the day is, to some people, superior to working a real job. True, some of the laborers are temporarily unemployed, and some are working while they have days off from their permanent jobs, but still others simply come to work a few days a week whenever they need cash. If