
Undercover in a Toronto factory where a temp worker died - Zarkonnen
http://projects.thestar.com/temp-employment-agencies/index.html
======
benlorenzetti
Having worked at two manufacturers in the Midwest, anecdotally the majority of
forklift drivers, line workers on specific lines, and even many white collar
office roles were filled by temp agencies. A similar structure existed for
engineering too; we would have a problem and the engineering firm with workers
under the same roof would develop a solution.

For the temp workers the motivation was always very clear and very much based
on working around labor laws. If a forklift driver got in an accident, it
wouldn't be counted in the same way. Line workers could be less rigidly
brought on board or let go with seasonal or other varying demand. They were
cheaper too and everyone worked hard to try and become a regular employee.

I am not sure what a solution is, after all these types of temp companies only
exist to skirt existing labor laws, suggesting these laws may defy economics a
bit too much. On the other hand what other ways do we have of increasing the
bargaining position of labor? Growing the economy, but that isn't something a
politician can honestly promise. Pulling back from globalization would, but
that is bad economics and bad for national security. Perhaps something like
earned income tax credit? Or perhaps we should just continue waiting until the
rest of the world develops and the supply of labor finally becomes
constrained.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
Ending right to work laws and bringing back unions.

~~~
RHSeeger
Of course, that too comes with it's negatives. Unions have both positives and
negatives. It's not a simple discussion.

~~~
mikeash
Corporations have both positives and negatives, yet somehow there's never a
debate over whether we should have _those_.

It's very strange to me that employees organizing and working together is so
controversial, but management doing the same thing is not only expected but we
can't even envision anything else.

~~~
benlorenzetti
I think one reason it seems so strange is that it is sort of a mis-
characterization/failure of communication that easily happens in politics.
There is nothing wrong with unions in principle, but once someone has written
into law exactly what a union is, then the possibility for mistakes and
unintended negative consequences exist. When the UAW were fighting for better
wages and conditions in bygone days, I don't think many at that time thought
the same laws would contribute to GM declaring bankruptcy and needing to be
bailed out by all 300+ million Americans, who were never involved in any of
the bad decisions made.

And reasonable people can quibble about who shoulders more of the blame, but
one can't deny that American labor costs were significantly higher than
foreign competition and were largely impossible to adjust.

Unions today need better leaders, who realize that the future is in
collaborating across national borders with their brethren at all global
corporations. The United States simply cannot enforce its own labor laws in
China or any other proud nation. Workers created unions themselves, they did
not need government to do it for them...which is good because neither the US
nor Russia or China rules the whole world.

------
mabbo
I don't understand how this strategy works. Company A doesn't want to hire
employees because employees have rights. Instead, they hire temps from Company
B who abuses their employees' rights.

Why doesn't the government start policing the abuse of rights by Company B?
Why doesn't the government pass laws that acknowledge that these employees are
truly employees of Company A?

~~~
Asooka
First, as stated in the article Company B practically doesn't exist and if it
gets closed, it can reappear as Company C next door. Second, because the
people writing these laws didn't envision such greed and now there's too much
lobbying money thrown around.

~~~
mabbo
> now there's too much lobbying money thrown around

But this is Canada! We have strict political donation laws and campaign
spending laws that really prevent lobbying from getting nuts like it is in
America.

I'm mostly upset because this is in my back yard. I could be at this factory
in 20 minutes in current traffic conditions.

~~~
rtkwe
Even with laws like that large companies have a lot of advantages in lobbying
for laws. First it's much easier for a large company to get lobbyists because
they have the money to hire them where workers and worker rights groups have
smaller purses to draw from. Second the things companies lobby for have nice
big metrics they can trot out, profitability, GDP or job growth, etc where
improving working conditions for industry X doesn't have a nice big number you
can trot out or even really benefits everyone in a way they can appreciate
where the pro-business side can draw more direct 'regulation X killed this
many jobs last year, repeal it and we swear we won't be evil.'

------
grecy
Many companies in countries like Canada and Australia are now trying harder
than ever to emulate the United States with it's extremely low wages, health,
benefits, etc. for temp or casual workers.

Unfortunately, it's a race to the bottom, as tens of millions of Americas will
attest to.

My simple question is - can we justify treating humans like this in the name
of increasing profit?

~~~
wiz21c
My second question is : why don't union gets bigger and stronger ? Millions
can't be put on the brink on poverty without an answer.

Yesterday, on a european TV, I saw a documentary about middle class people who
became half-homeless (their words). They were just unlucky to loose their
jobs. Now I understand they may have had too much credits or debts here and
there but, these were middle class, that is, they went _down_ the social path.
That's scary.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Almost no Belgians in Belgium are homeless. I haven't seen anyone, although
there seems to be some in the main capital.

I know a lot of refugees live in sheltes and currently there are homeless
people in Brussels due to the breakup of Calais. But these people don't want
to get asile in Belgium, but want to go to the UK. So that's why they don't
receive anything here. That is their choice ofc.

~~~
wiz21c
Yep, statistically there are not many. But people helped by "social security"
is growing faster than demographics. Those people are at the last level of
social welfare, after that they're super close to homelessness.

the thing is, before being homeless, you're already in deep shit.

for refugees, I think you're right but "their choice" is a way to frame them
that is a bit harsh. I see many of them everyday close to north station
(brussels) and I doubt it was their choice to be there in the first place.

(edited the station, it's the north one :-))

------
Jeremy1026
The last letter sent from Fiera to The Star[1] is scathing. Fiera is trying so
very hard to play the victim to The Stars mean and "underhanded" tactics to
get information about their operations. It probably would have served them
better to just remain silent instead of sending this response.

[1] [http://projects.thestar.com/temp-employment-
agencies/letters...](http://projects.thestar.com/temp-employment-
agencies/letters/letter-to-ms-mojtehedzadeh.pdf)

~~~
Danihan
I don't know, I find that letter pretty convincing actually. They seem pissed,
but they also make a lot of valid points.

~~~
lovich
At this point isn't it reasonable to assume that companies will not tell you
the truth if it puts them in a bad light, and you would need to go undercover
to find that truth? Companies cant tell their shareholders on one side that
they are doing everything to maximize profit, and on the other side say that
they will show their operations with all the good and the bad to anyone who
asks.

~~~
Danihan
Not really. I believe the journalist did sign a document that she knew where
the emergency exits were, and the only "damning" thing she found on-site was
an unclean bathroom and generally difficult work.

This whole thing seems like such a non-story to me. Maybe it's because I've
worked in factories before, but I've personally had more harrowing experiences
on my 1st day than anything mentioned in this article.

~~~
jakobegger
Unreachable emergency stop buttons? Moving parts of a fan next to workers
without safety covers? Workers fighting for space next to a crowded conveyor
belt? Missing guard rails? Repeated fines for lacking safety? Everything about
this factory sounds like a death trap.

~~~
Danihan
Until these things are flagged upon inspection (and they would) I'd take it
with a big grain of salt.

------
dsfyu404ed
I used to work in similar places. They suck. There's a reason people don't
wear loose fitting clothing around machinery though.

A lot of the author's complaints are just part for the course in these kinds
of environments. Low margin industries suck in general.

The problem here isn't temp agencies it's companies that would be doing bad
things anyway hire their full time workforce though temp agencies to create
level of abstraction that helps avoid liability. Obviously there's temp
agencies that cater directly to this but the problem is on the demand side.
Some companies want to treat people badly and they can use temp agencies to do
it.

I know people who have done very well (or as well as you can for those kinds
of jobs) at temp agencies. Employers can use a temp agency and if they like
the temp(s) they get they can direct hire the temp(s) and cut out the middle
man. This doesn't happen when your entire workforce is temps though.

~~~
exelius
> The problem here isn't temp agencies it's companies that would be doing bad
> things anyway hire their full time workforce though temp agencies to create
> level of abstraction that helps avoid liability.

The problem is worse than that. Companies are providing insufficient worker
trainings/protection to save money and hiding behind a temp agency for any
consequences of that decision. That way, when they get inevitably get sued,
the temp agency can declare bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the plant reassigns the
contract to a "new" company who then hires most of the same workers.

Here's how it works:

\- A holding company owns the factory and everything in it (equipment, etc).
Skilled labor (technicians, etc.) work for this company. This is also the
company that is most likely to be a subsidiary or joint venture of a publicly
traded company that you've heard of.

\- An operating company leases the factory from the holding company with the
goal of manufacturing something (but often something that the parent company
wants). The plant managers are probably the only people who work for this
company.

\- The operating company hires a temp agency to staff the line.

\- The temp workers are employed by the agency to work the line.

\- If a worker gets hurt, the temp agency can declare bankrupcy. Temp agencies
have few capital assets to go after, so even if you win, you're not likely to
get much.

\- Even if you can somehow get the operating company included in the suit for
negligent oversight, it too has very little in the way of assets.

\- The holding company (where the real assets exist) is protected by several
layers of liability.

\- The publicly traded company is out of the loop entirely, but still gets
cheap products to sell at their stores. Risk is transferred to workers in
order to save money.

------
walterbell
_> Fiera’s current clients include some of the continent’s biggest brands
including Dunkin’ Donuts and Sobeys; over the years it has made pastries for
Costco, Tim Hortons, Metro, Walmart, and Loblaw. Its factories churn out baked
goods by the truckload, destined for markets across North America and around
the world. They can produce 2 million bagels alone per day._

Retail boycotts have been used against clothing sweatshops.

Is there a reliable way to identify North American baked goods which originate
from these temp-labor factories? If all the large distributors use the same
suppliers, are there local bakeries which provide better labor conditions and
create better product?

~~~
castle-bravo
Consider getting a bread maker: Keurig for bread.

~~~
ams6110
Or a mixing bowl and 15 minutes or so to hand-knead. You don't need a machine,
likely also made in a factory under similar conditions, to make bread dough.

~~~
yial
I agree. As someone who bakes bread frequently there are many recipes that
don't require anything beyond ingredients , a bowl, and oven and some trays.

However, if you're really doing some serious dough, or just want to branch
out. A kitchenaid mixer makes it way easier to get windowpain, and if you're
all about the yeast, a food thermometer can be good.

------
jonssons
as an ex-temp worker: that's how it is. You want to work, you have to put up
with the stuff they throw at you. No. It's not fair. No. It's not just. It's
for the poor. It's for the uneducated. It's for the immigrants. It's for the
vulnerable people, because they are easy to exploit. They don't know their own
rights.

Temp offices should not be allowed to exist.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>Temp offices should not be allowed to exist.

I disagree.

Working for a temp agency doing catering, sports venue and whatnot is
generally more stable income than working for several places like that
directly. Temp agencies work well for industries where demand is variable but
predictable.

Companies that use temps to fill their baseline staffing requirements to skirt
legal/ethical requirements are terrible though.

~~~
frandroid
Catering companies, sports venues, etc. can still have you on-call. The
difference between a temp agency and a catering company is that it completely
severs the employment relation which protects the workers by law.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Yes, and that's usually worse than getting a fairly predictable number of
hours from a temp agency. A temp agency will generally try to avoid asking an
employees to be in multiple places at once. It's a pretty simple resource
allocation problem.

------
Theizestooke
That is some great journalism, can't remember the last time I read an article
like that. Also telling that this article has less than 20 comments on Hacker
News. Or maybe it's a sign of the times that this sort of stuff appears on a
tech news site at all.

~~~
jdietrich
If you want to see more journalism like this, subscribe to your local
newspaper.

Investigative journalism is slow, difficult and expensive. Sometimes it
doesn't yield anything worth printing, sometimes it results in a worthy but
dull story, sometimes it provokes major social change. You can't afford to do
serious investigative work on Adsense revenue.

Local newspapers are uniquely equipped to do this sort of work. They have the
local contacts, they have the experienced journalists who know their beat,
they have the trust of the community. Agencies like ProPublica do important
work, but they're no substitute for grass-roots journalism.

------
asdfasdfasd333
In August, charges were laid against Fiera Foods under the Occupational Health
and Safety Act for the 2016 death of a temp agency worker named Amina Diaby.
_Her hijab was caught in a machine, strangling her._

/thread.

~~~
FLGMwt
Not sure what you're trying to convey?

~~~
err4nt
Every single woodworking shop, electric shop, factory, etc I've been in they
always make a big deal about _never_ wearing loose-fitting clothing, long hair
or necklaces or bracelets - anything you wouldn't want torn off you at a fast
rate of speed with force you remove or restrain. This is common sense and
common instruction - I'm not sure what employment safety laws say about this.

If the cause of her death was loose-fitting clothing that's normally
prohibited from those environments because it's a serious danger and workers
have been getting caught in machinery as long as we've had machinery to get
caught in - and the only reason she was able to wear the clothing in that
environment was because of her religious rights guaranteed under the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which states that her religious rights
supersede any written legal code) then this mortal risk might be something she
fought to take on, even if the company recommended against it.

Imagine for a second that you're a motorcycle police officer, where it's
customary (even law) to wear a helmet, but you (for religious reasons) wanted
to wear your religious headwear in lieu of a helmet. Then imagine you were
killed on the job in a motorcycle crash due to a blow to the skull. Would
there be a need for a month-long undercover investigation to uncover the
reason you died?

~~~
frandroid
That's the point of the article, I think. Because Fiera doesn't have an
employment relationship with the employee, their workers' comp rates will
never increase, no matter what happens to the workers. So they don't take the
kinds of precautions which would have prevented this worker from dying. I
mean, it also severs to human connection between workers and managers, where
they just see workers as a dispensable resource, so there also less every day
care about safety.

~~~
Natsu
I read that as saying they couldn't stop her from wearing the hijab, which
limits their options. Reading the article, it seems like the other deaths were
caused by bad LOTO (lock out tag out) practices and one was some kind of
traffic accident.

If it were me, I'd look at ways to avoid normalization of deviance. Maybe
those with loose clothing can be given other things to wear or put into other
roles. Factory jobs are inherently crappy and employers generally given you
the legal minimums, as I know from direct experience. It's best to figure out
ways to make complying with the rules easier so that most companies and most
workers are complying with the law most of the time, but it's hard to give
clear answers on how to do that. Hopefully things continue to improve. I'm
sure there's a lot of room for it.

------
markvdb
A classic in this type of undercover journalism is the work of Günter Wallraff
in (West-)Germany:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Wallraff#Undercove...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Wallraff#Undercover_work)

------
transverse
How is it not her own fault for wearing dangerous clothing (a hijab) in a
factory workplace? Something as simple as long hair can be dangerous in such
an environment, and a hijab or scarf is unthinkable. Darwin award.

~~~
Cthulhu_
It's still the employer's fault though, they're supposed to have managers etc
that make sure people conform to safety rules and don't wear loose clothes,
have their hair tied back, wear hair and beard nets, remove jewellery, wash
hands, etc. Actually (reading further in the article myself now), the
journalist is told all that.

But on the other hand, there's religious freedom and rules that come into
play. In this case though, if she didn't want to remove or replace the loose
clothing, she shouldn't be allowed to work near dangerous machinery.

~~~
ams6110
Agree, but in the PC climate of today people are afraid to criticize any
expression of Muslim faith even for legitimate reasons such as "wearing a
hijab when using this machine will likely get you killed."

------
andrewl
This kind of article is a reminder of how much we need traditional newspapers,
and what we'd lose if they went away. I sometimes read suggestions that
independent bloggers will replace newspapers, but I don't think they can do
everything newspaper reporters do. This reporter worked undercover for a
month. There would also have been a lot of time spent on background research
before she went undercover. Then it would have taken her more time after that
to write the article. During all that time she was paid by the Toronto Star.
An independent writer could work undercover, and some have, but they're stuck
for that period making a very low salary and having to worry about making ends
meet.

Then, at least as important, the reporter is backed by the Toronto Star's
legal team. I suspect that if she were an independent and published her story
on her own blog, this writer would have been sued by the bakery owners and
compelled to take the story down. And she would also pay a lot for her legal
defense. In this case, if the bakery owners want to sue, they can, but they'll
be suing the Toronto Star, which has resources to mount a legal defense, and a
voice with which to write about an unjustified lawsuit.

So this seems like real journalism to me, and I don't want it to go away. And
when I say "real journalism" I'm thinking of George Orwell's view that
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything
else is public relations."

I'm also thinking of Finley Peter Dunne, who said the point of journalism is
to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

~~~
Cthulhu_
Bloggers can one-up journalists though - there's been a number of critical
blog posts and articles from (former) employees at Uber, Google, etc, which
eventually cost CEO's their jobs. Actually working and living the life is even
better than being a journalist and having to dive into it.

~~~
jdietrich
Your examples kind of undermine your point. Disgruntled Uber and Google
employees have the writing skills to make their point, they have the technical
savvy and the social capital to get their message to a wide audience, they
have the confidence and financial resources to resist legal bullying.

In a world without professional journalists, there's no-one to speak out for
the poor and marginalised, no-one to unearth stories that are being kept well-
hidden by unscrupulous people, no-one to do the months of digging and fact-
checking that are involved in a major investigation. Journalism is a highly
skilled craft that plays a vital role in society; we can't afford to delegate
it to amateurs.

------
CryptoPunk
If you impose mandatory higher standards for pay, benefits and training on
temp employment agencies, a great many of these jobs will simply cease to
exist. Given they're employing some of the most resource-challenged people,
such a social intervention is liable to cause far more harm than good.

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

~~~
sushid
Not sure if you read the article, but no one is talking about a higher
standards for pay and benefits. You're literally making generic libertarian
points.

The only direct criticism is that they don't enforce their own safety
guidelines which leads to the death of their workers. A great many of these
jobs can continue to exist even if their managers simply request those with
loose garbs or improper safety shoes, etc. to show up with proper clothes.

Moreover, if there were some sort of government mandated safety check (which
I'm not arguing for, just saying) the imposed burden is equal to all other
competing firms. Unless the onus of taking on such check was so great that
they suddenly decide to put all their money into R&D, these jobs will continue
to exist.

~~~
CryptoPunk
A lot of people are talking about higher mandatory standards in the wake of
this report, most importantly Ontario's Labour Minister:

[https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2017/09/11/temp-
work...](https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2017/09/11/temp-work-growth-
is-alarming-and-changes-are-coming-says-ontario-labour-minister.html)

Publicity of the working conditions and pay of low-skilled workers invariably
leads to calls for more stringent mandatory standards, as if you can outlaw
poverty and low-living standards.

>>Unless the onus of taking on such check was so great that they suddenly
decide to put all their money into R&D, these jobs will continue to exist.

The effect is on the margins. No single mandate will have a significant
impact, but each one adds costs, and in the aggregate, they have a significant
effect on economic growth, which is a compounding effect that translates to
massive long-term effects.

