| Today's post is shared from scienceblogs.com For eight years, Dora worked at a frozen pizza factory in Romeoville, Illinois, called Great Kitchens. For eight hours a day — sometimes seven days a week — she assembled pizza boxes or arranged cheese and other toppings on pizzas. The consequences of years of such repetitive work surfaced in October 2012, when her hands would go numb and a painful cyst formed on her left wrist. She told her supervisor about the problem, but he said he couldn’t do anything about it — Dora was a temporary worker hired through a staffing agency and so Great Kitchens wasn’t responsible for addressing her injury. “I went to the temp agency and they told me to just put a bandage around it and use ice and they would send me to work the next day,” said Dora, 36, who asked me not to use her last name. “It was seven months later that they sent me to a doctor because I couldn’t work anymore.” Unfortunately, Dora’s experience has become a typical one among temporary workers, as more and more corporations outsource their hiring to temporary staffing agencies and effectively absolve themselves of the legal responsibility of ensuring safe and healthy workplaces that adhere to labor laws. In other words, Dora and other temporary workers are considered employees of the staffing agencies, not the factory or office in which they actually work. That means it’s the staffing agency that takes on the workers’ compensation liability,... |
