CHICAGO — Last week, the Chicago-based group Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) filed its second class action lawsuit this year against an agency responsible for staffing Wal-Mart’s warehouse in suburban Elwood.
The suit, filed May 18, charges the staffing company SIMOS Insourcing Solutions with legal violations including not fulfilling promises made to workers as part of the terms of their hiring. Among other things, workers said they were offered paid vacations that were never granted.
According to a WWJ press release, the company “required employees to incur fees to get their paychecks and failed to give the warehouse workers critical information about their pay, benefits and other terms of their employment as required by Illinois law.”
The new class action lawsuit is part of a larger campaign to force staffing agencies to give workers written proof of their contracts, their wages and the way their pay is calculated. Wage theft is reportedly rampant in the industry, but often hard to prove since workers are given little or no documentation of what they have been promised, how many hours they have worked, how much they are paid and in some cases who they are even technically working for.
In March, the group filed another class action lawsuit alleging that the Reliable Staffing agency, which hired workers for the Elwood Wal-Mart warehouse, paid them much less than promised, in part through manipulating or changing the terms of a piece-meal pay schedule.
As I previously blogged:
“The check stub is a fiction – their check stub could show they worked 36 hours when they really worked 72 hours,” said attorney Chris Williams. That’s why, Williams said, it’s so important the workers are able to demand their billing records under the state day labor services act.
Also earlier this month workers at a Kraft-Cadbury warehouse in the suburb of Joliet filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about alleged discrimination by the firm Schenker Logistics. Filing such a complaint is the first step in filing an employment discrimination lawsuit, if the EEOC decides not to investigate itself.
These legal actions are part of a multi-faceted campaign to hold staffing companies legally accountable for their behavior; and also build greater public awareness of rampant labor rights issues in the warehouse industry; and to embolden workers to speak out about these issues. The group has not sued Wal-Mart, since the company argues it is not directly responsible for hiring and wage and hour issues in its warehouses. SIMOS is based in Georgia and promises to slash labor costs for clients like Wal-Mart. The company’s website says:
Ultimately, our goal is to drive constant improvements in cost, quality, and on time delivery. SIMOS consistently delivers cost reduction programs our clients can actually see. On average, SIMOS customers save 10-25% in labor costs per unit while increasing their output by 15-30%.
It says it achieves these labor cost reductions by a “combination of engineering, workforce management and supervision.” Critics say this is just code for paying workers as little as possible, including by keeping them in the dark about the actual terms of their working agreements.
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Kari Lydersen is a Chicago-based journalist, author and assistant professor at Northwestern University, where she leads the investigative specialization at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Her books include Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago’s 99%.
