temporary staffing agency
At Reveal, Will Evans investigates how lobbyists for the temporary staffing industry squashed a legislative effort in Illinois to reform the industry’s widespread discriminatory hiring practices. Evans has previously reported on how the temp industry discriminates against workers of color, particularly black workers, using code words, symbols and gestures to illegally hire workers according to sex, race and age.
In Illinois, the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative developed legislation to confront such hiring practices. Illinois Senate Bill 47 would have required temp agencies to track the race…
At Reveal, reporter Will Evans investigates discrimination within temporary staffing agencies, finding a pattern of racial, sexist and otherwise discriminatory hiring practices. He begins his story with Alabama-based Automation Personnel Services Inc., writing:
When its clients wanted to hire temp workers based on race, sex or age, Automation was happy to oblige, according to dozens of former employees.
Often, the practice was blatant. A manager at a Georgia manufacturing plant asked Christie Ragland not to send him “any black thugs,” she said. Ragland, a former Automation office manager…
March 2, 2011 may have seemed like any other workday for David Clark Jr., 51, when he arrived at the Lee Creek potash mine in Aurora, NC at 5:50 am to start his shift. Clark and a small crew would be excavating a large ditch near the R9 roadway and burying a 22-inch diameter polyethylene (HDPE) pipe. The pipe would be used to carry the "slurry" created by processing the phosphate ore.
The task involved fusing four large sections of the HDPE pipe together to make one length of pipe. Clark was a 24-year employee of Trader Construction Company and had worked as a contractor at the Lee Creek…