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Are workers being taken for a ride?
(Oregonian (Portland, OR) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Sep. 3--The workers say they gathered each day at Anytime Labor's storefront office and waited hours for a call from the Oregon coast.
When word came, they paid $6 to board a school bus -- more than 60 of them -- for the 2 1/2-hour ride from Hillsboro to fish-processing plants in the northwest corner of the state. They spent the night cleaning and sorting fish into plastic crates, bloodying their boots and gloves with fish guts.
Their start times varied, but they often rode the bus back near dawn, usually arriving after 7 a.m., unless the bus stalled or broke down. Hours later, they got up to do it all over again. They say they were paid minimum wage -- and only for the hours they spent on the processing line.
"We didn't say anything because we didn't want to lose our jobs," said Edelmira Hueramo, a Hillsboro resident speaking through an interpreter. "If you were cooperative like that, you were one of the people who got called back."
The workers, who are suing the staffing agency for back pay, are in the forefront of a national labor trend.
Staffing companies once supplied mostly file clerks and secretaries, but today they increasingly provide manufacturers a reliable, low-cost work force to fill less pleasant jobs. In 1989, one in 100 production workers was hired by a staffing agency. In 2004, the figure was one in 17, according to analyses of federal data by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
The firms are helping keep U.S. manufacturers competitive in a global economy because they absorb the costs of hiring, benefits and insurance against employee injuries. They often charge clients by the worker, adding a fee of about 30 percent of wages to cover payroll taxes, costs and profit.
But experts who study the labor market say workers recruited by staffing agencies are vulnerable to exploitation. The state and federal regulators who enforce wage and hour laws rely on worker complaints to alert them to potential violations, the experts said. Industrial workers hired by employment agencies -- often immigrants -- typically do not file complaints because they fear losing their jobs, lack familiarity with the laws and have no union to back them.
"The question is to what extent can the temp worker exercise their right in the workplace in a situation where they're regarded as often substitutable?" says Nik Theodore, director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "You speak up and complain . . . most likely you won't be sent back to work there the next day."
The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, which enforces state workplace laws, received one claim for unpaid wages and two complaints about Anytime Labor's pay practices between 2004 and 2006, according to wage-and-hour division administrator Christine Hammond. The claim was closed when the person who filed it failed to pursue it. One complaint resulted in a warning letter. The agency could not find any documents on how the other complaint was handled, Hammond said.
The Anytime Labor plaintiffs worked several summers for the firm before filing their lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the staffing agency and fish companies. In the suit, 11 former workers say they should be paid for hundreds of hours they spent waiting for and then riding the bus. They say their managers told them they would lose the work if they left either Anytime Labor's hiring hall or the plant in Hammond. And they assert they were forbidden from driving to the plant on their own.
They allege violations of state and federal wage and hour laws by Anytime Labor; Point Adams Packing Co. in Hammond; its San Francisco-based parent, California Shellfish Co.; and two of Anytime's managers. A former processor in Astoria, Custom Freezers, also has been named a defendant.
An attorney for Anytime Labor and managers at Point Adams acknowledged that workers were bused to and from Hillsboro. But they said workers were free to come and go from the hiring hall and the processing plant and travel to work on their own. No wage or hour laws were violated, they said.
"There is a very substantial dispute with respect to the facts and a very substantial dispute with respect to the law," said Tom Triplett, an attorney with Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt in Portland who is defending Anytime Labor.
The case, legal experts say, will turn on who benefited most from the long waits and bus rides. If employees are allowed to leave when they're not working, companies do not have to pay for the hours they're waiting. On the other hand, employees who are asked to stand by and await work are entitled to pay.
"Is the time primarily useful for the workers or primarily useful for the employer?" said Henry Drummonds, law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland. The answer, he said, "would be driven by the specific facts."
Tighter oversight sought
The role of independent staffing companies in supplying low-paid labor came into the spotlight earlier this year when federal agents raided the Fresh Del Monte Produce vegetable processing plant in North Portland. The 167 arrested workers had been hired by American Staffing Resources.
Federal agents also have found staffing firms hiring illegal immigrants to work in warehouses and production plants, including some food processors, in Washington, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey.
Anytime Labor relied heavily on immigrant labor, workers said. Hueramo, her husband, Margarito Hueramo, and her 17-year-old daughter, Felix Mariana Espinoza -- all of whom worked at the Point Adams plant -- are in the United States legally, according to D. Michael Dale, an attorney with Northwest Workers' Justice Project, an advocacy group that represents the workers.
Dale said he did not know the status of all workers recruited by Anytime Labor, an issue he said is irrelevant. Federal wage and hour laws, he said, protect all workers, regardless of citizenship.
Dale has pushed for tighter oversight of staffing companies, but his proposal attracted little support in the Legislature.
In April, the House Business and Labor Committee heard testimony on bills drafted by Dale that would have, among other things, allowed state regulators to shut down labor firms that subject workers to poor pay or working conditions. The bill also would have required companies to pay temp workers the same wage as full-timers in equivalent jobs.
Vincente Anguiano, one of the workers suing Anytime Labor, told the committee he had once been shuttled between two plants, working over four days with only a few hours of break between shifts.
But the bill was never moved to the floor for a vote. The committee chairman, Rep. Michael Schaufler, D-Happy Valley, said in an interview last month that he hopes to further study Dale's proposals before the 2009 legislative session.
Point Adams Packing sits near the mouth of the Columbia River, a half-mile from Fort Stevens State Park. For decades, more than 100 local workers processed salmon, crab and other fish year-round at the plant, filling nearby bars between shifts.
Declining salmon and bottom-fish populations and limits on pink shrimp and whiting harvests have left Point Adams operating largely in summer months, workers say. Area fish processors pay between the Oregon minimum wage of $7.80 an hour and $9 an hour, one hiring firm manager said, and locals rarely apply.
"A lot of the local people . . . more or less got tired of it," said Bill Martinez, who owns Pac-West Temporary Employment Services in nearby Warrenton and has hired workers for fish processors since 1995. At times, Martinez said, he has used 15-person passenger vans to transport workers from as far as Woodburn, 120 miles away. "That's how far out I have to go to recruit people to work here."
Edelmira Hueramo, her husband and her daughter said in interviews that Anytime Labor asked workers to report to its Hillsboro office about 10 a.m. and told them not to leave a cramped waiting room. Often, they said, Point Adams didn't summon workers until 2 or 3 p.m.
At least once, the company packed as many as 90 workers into the company-provided bus, Edelmira Hueramo said, setting up chairs in the aisle to accommodate everyone.
The bus broke down on multiple occasions -- at least 15 times over the summers the family worked at Point Adams, the family said.
One Friday evening two summers ago, the bus broke down on the east edge of Astoria, 25 minutes from the plant with 64 people inside, Espinoza said. Plant managers begged the labor firm to get the workers there any way possible, she said. Eventually, all the workers started walking toward the plant, many in hairnets and boots.
"It was a disaster," said Espinoza, who was 15 at the time. "We had to be careful no one got hit by the cars."
Management personnel of Point Adams and California Shellfish, through attorney Daniel R. Barnhart of Portland, declined to comment. Custom Freezers managers could not be reached for comment.
Four Point Adams employees not involved in the lawsuit said recently that Anytime Labor's bus often got delayed, disrupting production at the plant. But two managers disputed accounts of workers waiting for long periods at the plant for ships to arrive. "That happened maybe twice," said one manager, requesting anonymity because he had been instructed not to discuss the matter.
Many locals and a leader of a Portland-based union that represents about a dozen regular workers at Point Adams said they were unaware the staffing agency had bused workers to the plant so frequently.
"If there's something amiss here, we're undoubtedly going to have to have union reps in there more often," said state Rep. Brad Witt, D-Clatskanie, legislative director for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555.
Point Adams now uses other staffing firms to offload boats, workers said.
Earlier this year, Anytime Labor owner Kevin L. LaFurge sold the business to Command Center Inc., a chain of labor firms based in Post Falls, Idaho. LaFurge -- who received $1.4 million in stock, cash and assumed liabilities -- did not return messages.
Edelmira Hueramo and her daughter, meanwhile, shake their heads at all the waiting and traveling they tolerated.
"Nobody would say anything. Why? Because we needed the work," Edelmira Hueramo said.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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