Oakland Feels the Burden of the Rise in Temp Employment
Lorice Dykes once had a job as a bus driver for AC Transit. He had a family, insurance and a future -- everything he had worked for. Now he works two janitorial jobs, one at Allen Temple Church, and is just glad to have steady work after an accident impaired his eyesight. Unfortunately, he doesn't have access to the same pay scale or benefits offered by the church because, technically, he works for a staffing agency, which offers only limited health care and other benefits.
As a result, Dykes spends a portion of his paycheck on medical insurance.
After searching more than a year for a job, Dykes found out firsthand that there aren't many alternatives: Unemployment in Alameda and Contra Costa counties has dropped to below 8 percent. But in East Oakland, where the church is located, joblessness runs as high as 35 percent, and it's 45 percent in West Oakland, according to estimates from the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, or EBASE.
The experience "has been humbling," Dykes said last month after a town hall meeting held at the church about, ironically, the plight of contingent and low-wage workers.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, and a dozen labor advocates were there to support the "Part Time Worker Bill of Rights" legislation that would increase eligibility for employer-provided health insurance, family and medical leave, and pension plans for workers such as Dykes whose presence in the job market is growing, alarming some analysts and advocates.
Even at Oakland's City Hall a growing number of security officers and other positions are contract workers or temporary hires, according to Josie Camacho of the Alameda Labor Council.
"We really are living in part-time America," she said.
Analysts have given them names such as "precariat" and "permatemps," reflecting the inadequacy of old labels in a new economy that began to develop in the 1990s and accelerated during the recession.
"Why has it taken so long when it has been slowly creeping in right under our doorsteps?" an SEIU member demanded during the hearing. "We're losing things we have fought for, for years."
The answer, the Rev. Daniel Buford of Allen Temple responded, is that until recently many workers did not feel the need for someone to speak up for them. "To be working in the wealthiest country in the world is a contradiction," he said.
The contradiction is increasingly common nationally, where a third of people in poverty are working full-time jobs and the median household income has plummeted by 14 percent nationally in the past decade.
In Contra Costa and Alameda counties, the drop in household income translates to $7,267 from 2000 to 2010, according to Nikki Fortunato Bas of EBASE.
"What choices, what sacrifices would you make if your income went down that much?" she said. "Workers are stuck between unemployment and low wages."
Chad Stone, chief economist with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said it's not a "slam dunk" that the trend means the middle-class is being hollowed out or that the problems will become structural.
But for now, the trend toward contract and low-wage jobs shows no signs of reversing, locally, in California or nationally, according to labor analysts and advocates, who see the labor market increasingly dominated by contingent workers -- part-timers, the self-employed, temps, on-call workers and independent contractors.
Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that in April 2012, nearly 2.5 million jobs were temporary, a 13 percent increase over 2010 numbers. The number has risen to more than 2.7 million temp jobs in April 2013. California staffing companies employed nearly 1.2 million people for temporary or contract work in 2011, according to the American Staffing Association.
"Job quality and pay have been eroding for a long time," said Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and co-director of the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. In addition, a college degree no longer guarantees a full-time job with benefits.
The fear is that the trend is exacerbating income inequalities that have grown worse with each decade.
Some workers opt for the flexibility of part-time or contract work. But 7.9 million part-time workers and millions of temps have few alternatives because their hours had been cut or they were unable to find a full-time job, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in May. The positions being created tend to be either highly specialized or low-wage and low-skill, such as home health care, warehouse workers and wait staff, current figures from the Employment Development Department show. The jobs offer no advancement or security.
Those employees often are paid less, have few or no benefits, get no sick or vacation days and have to pay their own Social Security taxes. Researchers at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley analyzing 2010 census data found temps in California were twice as likely as permanent hires to live in poverty, receive food stamps and be on Medicaid, the government-subsidized medical insurance. The majority -- 62 percent -- had no health insurance through their employer, while 39 percent had no health insurance at all.
They work for some of the largest business giants in the Bay Area, such as Apple, Wal-Mart and Amazon, and have to penetrate multiple corporate layers and have less protection against retaliation when they try to advocate for better conditions.
John Robinson works for Universal Protective Services, which is contracted by the Unity Council nonprofit to patrol the Fruitvale Village transit station between BART and East 12th Street. At $16 an hour, much of his pay goes to rent, food, medical insurance for he and his wife, and fees for his uniform and work shoes than can run $150 a pair. And he is one of the better paid employees because he is a supervisor.
Two of his fellow guards, a man and a woman, live in single-room occupancy hotels in downtown Oakland. Robinson suspects others of being homeless. Many security guards work two jobs to get by.
"We're asking for a decent wage," he said recently, before he and fellow Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West members rallied in San Francisco over pay and health care benefits. "We've had to cheapen ourselves for too long," he said.
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