Controversy Over State’s ‘Right To Know’ Bill

When an employment agency assigns a worker to a job, the worker should know who they’ll be working for, how much they’ll be paid and what the assignment involves.

At least that’s the premise of a bill now under consideration in the state legislature. It may sound like an idea that wouldn’t evoke much controversy, but the bill is generating plenty of fire from both sides.

On one side, unions and other workers’ rights advocates say the law would stop unscrupulous employers from taking advantage of temporary workers. On the other, staffing agencies say it would represent yet another layer of expensive paperwork for an already overburdened industry.

Put It In Writing

The bill, known as the “temporary workers right to know bill” and filed as Senate Bill 680 and House Bill 1797, would require that temporary agencies provide certain information, including the name of the contracting employer and the rate at which the worker will be paid on the first day of any assignment. For workers given an assignment over the phone, the same information would have to be given during the call, and a written notification would have to be included with their next paycheck.

Tim Sullivan, legislative and communications director for the state AFL-CIO, said it’s common for legal service organizations to get calls from day laborers who worked for several days and then weren’t paid.

“They’ll ask what was the employer’s name, and they’ll say ‘They told me his name was Joe,’” he said. “How do you get that money back? It’s total exploitation.”

Melissa Pomfred, a staff attorney with the Legal Assistance Corp. of Central Massachusetts in Worcester, said she sees many of those sorts of complaints, particularly from construction workers, cleaners and factory workers. She said such cases have become more common since the start of the recession.

“The gloves are off now for employers,” Pomfred said.

She said the bill would help investigators follow up in these cases and help educate workers about their rights.

To Jo-An Gladstone, founder and owner of SelectStaff in Framingham, it’s obvious that employees ought to have the pertinent information about their assignments. And, she said, her company and all the other temp agencies she knows of already do so over the phone. But she said putting the information in writing and including it with a paycheck is more complicated than it might appear.

Gladstone said SelectStaff uses a specialized program for its record-keeping and payroll, and the program doesn’t offer a way to print the specific information that the bill requires. That means someone would have to compile it by hand.

“It would be a nightmare,” she said. “We would have to hire someone just to do that.”

And Gladstone said other staffing agencies use payroll services that aren’t equipped to put together a written account of an employee’s assignments.

Sullivan said he finds it hard to believe that it would be a great hardship for a company to somehow produce a written record of employees’ assignments, especially given the significance of such a measure for protecting vulnerable workers from exploitation.

“Legitimate employers, people with employees, have to fill out all sorts of paperwork,” he said.

But Gladstone said supporters of the bill simply don’t understand the kind of burden they’re proposing. “When people say we have all this paperwork, so what’s a little bit more, they have no idea what they’re talking about,” she said.

The Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce Development held a hearing about the bill in late October, but it has not yet moved out of committee.