When I was a temp worker, I had some rather interesting experiences, some more enlightening than others. The following story concerns a job that had a lesson about business practices, regulation, and labor unions—all within the span of a few minutes, although the run-up to those revelations took over a month of complete ignorance:
I was directed to meet with some other temps at a warehouse in Renton. The new owner of the warehouse was a company that was relocating from Seattle. A supervisor from the company met us inside the building, and gave us some brief instruction about what we were expected to do. The warehouse was empty save for one section occupied by about ten or so rows of pallet shelving, an electric lift, and various tools. The job was simple enough: take apart the shelving, and stack it in a neat and orderly fashion. So we dislodged the long metal bars with hammers, load them on the lifts, stacked them off to the side segregated by size and type, and then used power tools to remove the large bolts from the concrete floors to dislodge the vertical poles that kept the horizontal bars in place.
It only took only a week to accomplish that task, and I thought that was the end of the job. But the supervisor had another job for us: re-install the edifice in another section of the warehouse. We were all “experts” by now of taking apart things, but we were strictly amateurs at building things. The supervisor gave us some placement measurements and a tape measure, and supplied an electric power drill to bore holes in the cement in order to hammer in the long bolts used to secure the vertical poles. After watching us work for a few days, he told us we were doing a great job, and told us that we could come in as early as we wanted and work as many hours as we wanted, only to just remember to plug in the electric-powered equipment before we left, to recharge the batteries overnight; he would leave the key to the building in a lock box next to the door that was not actually locked. Being temp workers, we welcomed the opportunity to make a lot of overtime pay. I took a redeye bus from Seattle, arriving at the warehouse at 4 AM, and worked until as late as 6 PM. The work was actually rather fun, hammering the bars in place and observing our handiwork taking proper shape with a certain amount of pride. The supervisor made one or two appearance to see how things were going, but otherwise we were completely on our own.
I would notice that during the day, employees at the nearby warehouses took an overly keen interest in what we were doing, although they never spoke to us. After four weeks, most of our project was completed, and I rather loathed for the job to end. But this job would end, but not quite in the fashion that any of us expected. We were hammering away one afternoon when a bearded man we had never seen before walked into the building, a rather wide smirk on his face. He grandly announced that if we did not vacate the premises in fifteen minutes, he was going to call the police and have us arrested. No one knew what he was talking about and what we had done wrong, but just the threat of arrest was sufficient to comply. I called the supervisor the inform him of what was going on, and for some reason he didn’t seem the least surprised or disturbed. Before I left, I asked the intruder why we were being kicked out, and he was genuinely surprised that we had no idea why he was there; we were just temps who were doing what the supervisor told us to do. I was told that the company who hired us had a city permit to take down the shelving with non-certified workers, but not to put-up the shelving with non-certified (or rather, non-union) workers, apparently for safety code reasons.
So what happened? The company that employed us thought they could skirt regulations by surreptitiously employing a bunch of guys who did not know the “rules” and were eager to work. Being surrounded by older white guys working at the nearby warehouses, the mostly “ethnic” composition of our workforce aroused suspicion, particularly given the odd hours we worked. Someone must have spied on our doings, and deciding that we were working illegally, called a city inspector. The attitude of the supervisor when I called him made it clear that he was well aware of the fact his company was engaged in something not entirely legal. I can’t say exactly how it felt to be a pawn in a cat-and-mouse game with city regulators in the run-up, but it was exciting for a few minutes at any rate.
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