“I Was Just a Body”

By 5 a.m., workers have already begun to gather at the labor pool. They sit on rickety benches or upside-down buckets, stretching across the floor once every other space is taken. Pipes leak overhead, and the walls are peeling. The bathroom—when workers are even allowed to use it—reeks. It is not a place anyone wants to be. But for people with criminal records in Florida, labor pools offer a rare opportunity to legally earn money, satisfy court-mandated conditions, and support their families.

Online, temp agencies proclaim: We improve lives. We empower you. Inside—as we have uncovered at our Florida-based worker center, Beyond the Bars—the reality is very different. At the most precarious tier of the temp industry, labor pools operate out of small storefronts called “labor halls,” often in low-income neighborhoods. These agencies hire people for day-to-day manual labor, typically at construction sites doing cleanup. Workers arrive before dawn and wait, sometimes for hours, hoping for a “ticket” assigning them to a job. Pay is daily, unpredictable, and often just enough to keep them afloat. Some workers never get a ticket at all; others remain in a cycle of intermittent, insecure work for years.

More conventional temp agencies are also massively exploitative. Many now operate online, using databases and apps to place workers in assignments. While jobs may last longer and pay weekly, workers often earn low wages and have little control over where or when they work. After criminal background checks are conducted, workers with records are given less desirable jobs, often in warehouses, factories, and hospitality sites. Still, they keep showing up—because probation officers demand proof of employment, because fines can only be deferred for so long, and because the alternative is jail.

The carceral system and the temp industry reinforce one another, forming a closed circuit where punishment and profit blur. The carceral system maintains control through the threat of incarceration; the temp industry through the threat of unemployment. Together, they keep workers suspended in the “temp trap,” one missed paycheck away from going back to jail.

The path to the temp agency begins long before anyone walks through its doors. The conditioning starts in county jails, where people awaiting trial may work as “trustees”—a system presented as voluntary but driven by coercive deprivation—cooking, cleaning, and caring for others in custody in exchange for basic privileges like an extra tray of food. For those who go to prison, the conditioning intensifies. Most people must work. Refusal can result in solitary confinement or loss of basic privileges, like visits with their family. The Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause permits forced labor “as punishment for a crime.” In Florida, where conditions are particularly stark, nearly all prison labor is unpaid. Prison industry jobs—considered the sole exception to that rule—typically pay between 20 and 95 cents per hour. These wages are so low that a single phone call home can cost a day’s earnings.

After release, control often shifts into state supervision: house arrest, probation, community control, conditional release, or parole. In Florida alone, more than 145,000 people are currently under some form of state supervision. Supervision agreements mandate employment even as they destabilize it. Random drug tests can derail workdays. There may be daily curfews, in-person check-ins, court appointments during work hours. Some must wear GPS monitors on their ankles at all times and request permission to change jobs. Even then, officers can show up at worksites wearing bulletproof vests to verify compliance.

Julian, who is forty-seven, has been on probation for nearly a decade, with another decade still ahead of him. He has relied on temp work in Tampa to support himself. “They come to your job site in an unmarked car, but the back of the plate is a yellow state plate . . . and they’re fully geared up with their bulletproof vests and everything,” he said. “You can imagine, depending on where you work, that kind of appearance can put your job at risk.”

And officers breathe down your neck, demanding that you pay any debts owed. Court fees, supervision costs, and restitution create intense pressure to find work under the threat of reincarceration. It is a system that commands people to work while setting them up to fail.

The requirements are so invasive that regular, full-time work, even if you make it through the background check, becomes nearly impossible. The bus home from work is late? Your officer might violate you. Your boss asks you to stay longer? Choose between missing curfew or risking your job. Last year, at least 128,000 people sent to prison committed no new crime, but instead were incarcerated for “technical violations” such as missing a check-in or a fee payment.

David, now forty-one, spent much of the 2010s cycling through the carceral system on drug-related convictions and was on probation until 2020. What he remembers most is how quickly probation could tighten its grip, without offering the stability it demanded. “They’ll put you in a program in a heartbeat if you mess up, but they won’t help you find a job to keep you from slipping in the first place,” he said. “It feels like they’re waiting for you to fail rather than setting you up to succeed.”

David, Julian, and the other workers quoted here are members of Beyond the Bars. They all asked to be identified by an anonymized first name due to concerns about retaliation and they have all primarily relied on labor pools to find work after incarceration, typically performing day labor in construction sites and manufacturing facilities in Florida, earning at or near the minimum wage.

For them, as for hundreds of thousands of others caught in this bind, blue-collar temp agencies seem like the best option, and even a pathway to opportunity: minimal to no background checks, hiring within days, flexibility around court requirements, and few questions asked. As Robert, newly released from prison, said, “I was under pressure, not just from the probation officer but from the landlord. . . . If I hadn’t found work [at a temp agency], I probably would have been violated.”

What workers find instead is an employment structure built on exploitation.

The temp industry’s business model depends on wage suppression and the fragmentation of responsibility. Temp agencies supply labor to host employers and typically act as the legal employer of record, handling payroll, taxes, insurance, and paperwork in exchange for an hourly fee skimmed directly from workers’ wages. If a host employer pays $20 per hour for a worker’s labor, the agency might keep $6 as its markup and pay the worker $14. A wage increase without a corresponding increase in the host employer’s bill rate may eat into the agency’s profit margin.

To protect that margin, and the steady supply of precarious workers they rely on, temp agencies may engage in anticompetitive practices: steep placement fees charged to host employers who want to hire temp workers directly and, according to our organizers at Beyond the Bars, informal blacklisting of workers who turn down job assignments.

Michael, age thirty-seven, moved through life in short cycles, working, getting pulled back into the system, then trying again. Between 2008 and 2020, he served multiple brief jail sentences, never more than four months at a time, and each return made stability harder to hold onto. Temp agencies promised a foothold. Instead, he found a revolving door. Recalling a host employer that wanted to hire him permanently but refused to pay the agency’s placement fee, he said, “Y’all don’t own me.” When he finally found permanent work, the difference was immediate: “I was treated with more respect, paid way better, got more hours. They made me feel like I was worth something. At the temp agency, I was just a body.”

Meanwhile, host employers—who control the actual work, from pace and conditions to scheduling—use the temp agency’s status as employer of record to disclaim responsibility for temp workers’ wages, safety, and rights. They may use temp agencies to try and avoid collective bargaining obligations, wage-and-hour and discrimination laws, and the costs of unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation. In some cases, companies drive wages down by contracting with multiple temp agencies for the same worksite, creating competition among agencies that can lower pay for workers.

The triangular relationship between the worker, temp agency, and host employer fragments accountability. When a temp worker is injured, the agency and host employer point fingers at each other. The temp agency disclaims responsibility for conditions at the worksite, and the host employer claims it is not the employer, making it extraordinarily difficult for workers to assert their rights.

The consequences can be devastating. Forty-seven-year-old Andrea earned a medical assistant certification and dreamed of working in health care. After a clinic let her go when they discovered her record, she found work through a temp agency at a lab processing medical samples. One day, a urine sample exploded in her face. She later learned the patient had herpes. When she tried to report the exposure, the agency told her to contact the host employer; the host employer said she wasn’t their employee. No one accepted responsibility. She paid for her own medical care.

Even when workers manage to hold an agency accountable, there may be no lasting consequences to the agency. Agencies can simply close and reopen under a new name.

Temps are about 50 percent more likely to be injured on the job than permanent employees. In a survey by the National Employment Law Project, one in four temp workers reported experiencing wage theft. Seven in ten reported retaliation for raising workplace concerns with management.

Workers know the truth: the temp industry is built to keep them compliant, fragmented, and disposable.

Decarceral and labor organizing are inseparable. The blue-collar temp industry—especially at its lowest tiers—sets the floor for wages and conditions across the industries it feeds, pulling everyone downward. Workers with records are on the frontlines of that fight. If we don’t organize these workers, we surrender the ground on which the future of work, and the possibility of freedom, is built. There is no path to ending incarceration without transforming the conditions of work.

_{Image: Shane McLendon / Unsplash}

Contributors

Maya Ragsdale Maya Ragsdale is the Co-Executive Director of Beyond the Bars, a worker center in Florida organizing workers with records. Her analysis in this essay draws on The Temp Trap: A Blueprint for Organizing Workers In the Temp Industry, a report based on two years of organizational research

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• carceral labor
• community organizing
• incarcerated workers
• organizing
• unions