| Popis: |
This article reports on preliminary research concerning temp agency workers in the logistics hub that serves the Port of Newark/Elizabeth. Our objective is to explore the potential for organizing temporary workers in this industry, and the viability of the hiring hall model in particular. The first section describes several aspects of the regional labor market in which temp agency workers are recruited for the inland warehouses and distribution centers. The second section explores the history and legality of hiring halls, and why this organizing model has in recent decades faded into disuse. The third section sets forth an exploratory plan for organizing the temporary workforce in New Jersey’s logistics industry. Based on his observations of dock work at the Port of New York in the early 1950s, Larrowe (1955, 49) defined a casual labor market as one in which the need for workers varies frequently and widely at a number of different points. Workers are hired for a few hours or for a short period, some of them picked at random when the employer is hard-pressed to complete the job quickly. He further stressed “the unrestricted movement in and out of the market by the workers themselves”, resulting in the “chronic labor surplus which typifies such markets” (Larrowe 1955, 50). Larrowe’s description fits the same industry just as well today, although its location has conspicuously changed. The work of handling ocean cargo has been moved some 36 miles inland to rural communities in central New Jersey, just off Exit 8A of the New Jersey Turnpike. Here, a conglomeration of warehouses and distribution centers (W/DCs) receive goods from the Port of Newark/Elizabeth (the nation’s second largest), where they are unloaded from containers by hand, put onto pallets, sometimes processed, and then formed into orders and shipped to major retail outlets or directly to consumers. Instead of the workforce Larrowe (1955, 49–50) found, led by “a relatively small core” of mostly white workers of Irish and Italian descent, the reserve army of low-wage laborers critical to central New Jersey’s logistics hub consists today almost exclusively of immigrant Latinos. And, instead of being organized and |
