Hi, everybody. Welcome to our session. I'm so sorry to run in late. I got talking with somebody that I studied for the boards with 25 years ago, or more, 35 years ago, and I'm so sorry for being late, but thank you for joining us. Excuse me. I ran here. Thank you for joining us. Today we're going to talk about workers in the temporary staffing industry. We've been working on this issue in the state of Illinois for some time, and Michael Foley at State of Washington Labor and Industries has also been working on it for a long time, and we were able to converge and put together a session for you. So Mike is going to talk first. We're each going to talk for about 10 to 15 minutes, and then there will be lots of time for questions. Okay. I'll stop. Thanks. All right. All right. How's this? Can people hear me? It's a little bit far from the microphone. Thanks, Linda. My name's Mike Foley. I work at the SHRP program at the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, and by way of background, I'm actually an economist by training, but that was a long time ago, and since then I've basically become a workers' comp data person. About 20 years ago, we got interested in looking at our workers' comp data in Washington State because it is quite unique in that we're one of the only states that has a monopoly state-run workers' compensation fund covering about 75% of the workers in the state, and we also receive data from the self-insured portion, the largest companies like the Boeings and so forth. We get their data as well when claims get closed for those companies. So we basically get all the data that insurance companies have, and it allows us to do some kind of interesting work. I wanted to just, by way of background, just talk briefly about what motivated the study, which was that we've been reading about, for myself at least the last 30 years, that the structure of work, the employment arrangements that we've historically come to expect as typical have been transforming pretty rapidly. In the standard employment model, which is kind of the way the OSHA laws got written and a lot of our educational interventions assume this kind of employment structure, the lead firm, which is the firm that calls forth production, is also the employing firm and is also the firm that controls the work site. They're the host firm. In that model, there's clear responsibility for occupational health and safety management, compliance with wage and hours laws, and coverages for social insurance programs. In that model, there's a direct pathway for regulatory compliance action. You go to the work site, you find the problems, and you can work with the manager that actually controls the work site. But employment arrangements have been changing rapidly, and there are various other alternative models. I've listed them all here, just by way of giving you a flavor of it all, but staffing agencies is what we're going to be talking and focusing on today. There are also work sites with multiple employers, contract services companies, which send workers to a work site. Franchised employers, where there's a franchisee and a franchisor, and the responsibilities for safety can get divided, and there are pressures from the franchisor that limit the franchisee's ability to make investments. There's online platform contracting work spreading, not just keyboarding either, but production work. There's supply chain contracting, where the lead firm calls forth a long chain of production, and basically is at an arm's length relationship, but basically sets the production pressures that all the contractors have to abide by. There's a lot of different kinds of structures, but they all share implications for occupational health and safety, which we may need to worry about. The division of responsibility for management of a safe workplace, for training, for providing PPE, for ensuring hazard communication, increasing number of short-term workers at various new work sites that they don't have experience with. Communication gets inhibited when workers are only at a work site for a brief period of time, and they may not feel safe to raise concerns or even be able to identify hazards. This greatly complicates regulatory oversight and compliance. For instance, in staffing agency situations, compliance intervention has to reach across a triangulated relationship between the staffing agency, the workers, and the host employer in order to clarify roles and responsibilities and assign liability. So it's a mess, but why should we worry? Well, temporary help is expanding beyond the traditional office clerical kind of work into higher hazard industries. If we look at Washington State employment of temporary workers in office work, it's actually been declining over the previous decade, from 2011 to 2017, and that's continued. Whereas in higher hazard, fundamentally higher hazard industries like construction and manufacturing and even healthcare, there's been substantial growth. Numbers are still small, although if you add up all of the non-office work that temporary workers get sent to, it's above 65% of all temporary work assignments. And some work I did a couple of years ago with our claims, we were able to compare temporary workers to permanent peer workers performing the same or similar tasks in the same work sites. And Washington State has unusually good data for workers' comp in that we actually rate exposure by the hour instead of by the payroll. So we're able to actually generate claims rates, that is claims per 100 full-time equivalent workers. And that's what we've got here, lost workday claims rates, and I'm sorry it's a little small, by 100 FTEs, and each of the categories there are different industry groupings. There are risks called risk classes, ranging from agricultural services at the top and vehicle operation, construction, all the way down to fields or warehousing, healthcare, and tech services and offices way at the bottom, that's the very short bar. The black bars are the temp workers, and the gray bars are the permanent peer workers. And you can see in virtually every industry, every risk class grouping, the temp work rate is substantially higher than the permanent peer rate. Overall, adjusting for the difference in composition across industries, there's a rough doubling of the injury rate for temp workers as compared to permanent peers. It's 100% higher. Now we're able to, using the claims data, we're able to contact injured workers in temporary as well as permanent workers in the peer industries, and take them through a survey that got at some of the, so what's behind this? What we found was some of the contributing factors were assignments to hazardous jobs, job switching, that is after the temporary worker arrived at the work site, they did the job they were supposed to do, they knew about for a while, but then they got switched to a different and more hazardous job. The workers were typically younger, much less experienced, of course, by definition, and they were new workers. They were new at every work site that they went to, which raises the hazard for workers. And they were afraid to speak up. Many of the workers wanted to get hired on as permanent workers, and host employers were using the temp agency contract as a way of screening workers in a kind of probationary period after which they would offer a permanent assignment. So workers were afraid to speak up when they saw a hazard or when they themselves got injured. There were unclear employer responsibilities, confusion between the host employer and the staffing agency as to who was responsible for what. And very inadequate safety training. Many temporary workers receiving little to no on-site training. So the recommendations were, of course, to correct, put in incentives to improve the screening and training of temporary workers, improve hazard communication between the host employer and the staffing agencies so that the staffing agencies can't wash their hands of the situation. They need to know what's going on in the work site. Clarify both employers' safety responsibilities. And strengthen the temporary agency's role. As I said, they need to get involved in the work sites. And finally, updating of OHS enforcement procedures and rules and law to reflect the spread of nonstandard work arrangements. Stop assuming that we've got that standard employment arrangement in the workplace. So that sort of motivates what I wanted to talk about next, which is I serve as a co-chair for one of the NIOSH NORA services sectors called the Services Sector Council. It's the biggest in terms of the number of workers. About 70 million workers are in the services sector. It ranges across everything from waste management, to janitorial work, to office work, to teachers. And I wanted to draw your attention to this is the website to find this. If you go to the NIOSH website, into the NORA tab, you'll see the councils and we're down there at the bottom. Services. If you click on that, it'll take you to this page. And I want to talk about that document there. Best Practices for Host Employers. This is pretty new. We just published it in August, after about a four-year period of struggle. Here's its homepage, looking nice and graphically. Just to quickly take you through, I have a whole talk about the document, but I want to talk about a couple of other things first. Just running through this document, it's organized in this kind of wheel, sort of a Venn diagram, if you want. Starting from the top, kind of in phases as the relationship between the host employer and the staffing agency rolls along. Starting with choosing a staffing agency. How do you do that? How does a host employer find a good staffing agency to work with? How to write a contract. And then it moves into the training part, and then hopefully this isn't needed, but we do, of course, need to include how to report injuries and illnesses, what to do in terms of response and record keeping. The document is also organized where, after each, so we didn't want it to be just dry and have a bunch of, a list of things to do. But after each major section, we included a scenario, a kind of story that works in all of the things in that previous section, in the form of a story where a host employer is searching for a staffing agency, or where they need to talk about the contract, when they do the training, and when they have an injury happen, what happens afterwards. So there's, for each one of these sections, there's a scenario. And at the end, there's an appendix which has a kind of checklist for each of the sections that can be copied off. Just quickly through the evaluation, I know we've got to get through things. These are some of the things that the document covers. The staffing, the host employers should review their own worksite in terms of the tasks, their job hazard analyses, do them if they don't have them, what equipment is going to get used, and go over all of this with the staffing agency to identify exposures and necessary PPE and training. Give the staffing company all requested safety data, and invite the staffing company over for a walkthrough and a safety appraisal. And also ensure that the staffing company has a commitment to safety, including a process for evaluating job candidates for appropriate qualifications and experience. Click on, okay. The contract, it's really important that the contract be detailed and specified and set forth these responsibilities. You're kidding. Two minutes? All right. I'm going to run through this really quick. You can read as well as I can. Communication, injury and illness reporting, response. Moving on to the training. All temporary workers should be on new assignments or new job tasks should get trained, and that training should be identical or equivalent to that provided the permanent workers, and it should be done prior to the beginning of work. These are the kind of tasks, the topics that should be covered. Linda, I did not know I was going to be pulled off, hooked off the stage that quickly. Just the third bullet down, training, this is very important. I wanted to say this. The supervisors of temporary workers need to be trained about how to work with temporary workers. They're not the same as permanent workers, and the supervisors need to be trained about what kind of tasks are approved for those workers and what are not approved for those workers. They need to know how to communicate effectively with temporary workers, often in another language, and make them feel comfortable speaking up about their safety concerns. I'm going to completely skip over, with the last point being record keeping. Other work that Dr. Bonato and others have done at SHARP have found that fewer than half of employers who use temporary workers knew that they needed to record injuries to the temporary workers on their own OSHA 300 log. They're the controlling employer. It needs to be on their log, and they don't know it. The BLS survey of occupational injuries and illnesses greatly undercounts injuries to temp workers. Checklist at the end, we're in the midst of a big dissemination campaign. We can read all about it. This is part of it, actually, what I'm doing today. So far, we've had over 7,000 page views, 2,000 downloads of the training document. Our partners with the American Staffing Agency and the American Society of Safety Professionals are doing a lot of work to get this out to their membership. And this is the one thing I wanted to, kind of good news I wanted to bring up today, is Washington State has written, and it's just come into effect, the first OHS focused temporary protection law. It's currently just limited to the construction and manufacturing sectors with those NAICS codes 23, 31 to 33. But a lot of it is based off of both the OSHA Temporary Worker Initiative stuff and the host employer document. It includes requirements for pre-assignment review and mitigation of hazards, clarification of responsibilities for training, and I'm most excited about both employers must document that the training was done and they documented and informed the other party that it was done within three business days. So staffing agencies can't get out of saying, by saying, we didn't know they were up on our roof when they should have been just on the ground. So inform worker how to report hazard concerns, all the task changes must be pre-approved, and the host employer must allow an on-site visit by a staffing agency rep. It's just been adopted. The final rule filed October 7th, it's past October 7th, and sorry for running over. And outreach to staffing companies is underway right now. Thanks. I'm out of breath. Let me click out of this for you. All right. So I'll be following up some additional information on workers' compensation and staffing companies, focusing primarily on exclusive remedies and what that means from a workers' comp for perspective. And I know we've got some very seasoned octocs here. We've got some new faces. So I'll try to get a little bit of the background, as you've heard also from Washington State and what this kind of means. And I think the key thing for these staffing companies with workers' compensation, I mean, it's interesting because it really provides a pathway to kind of the traditional American dream where you can just get a job, start working. But it also provides or has a lot of risk for those that are at risk that you'll hear about in a little bit. So as far as kind of the changing base for work, you know, traditionally, you know, you see Walmart, 1.6 million employees, Amazon, General Motors, hundreds of thousands. And you know, we're more familiar these days. You hear in the news, the gig economy, Uber, a million drivers, and DoorDash got to 100,000 within four years. But what's interesting is the staffing companies, Manpower, 600,000 workers in assignment globally daily. There's more than 3 million temporary workers and contract employers at American staffing companies daily. And with the staffing companies, you know, you're really looking at the wages, the benefits, workplace safety, impacts on the traditional small business, and legality. And we'll get into some of the legal issues with the exclusive remedy and everything like that. And of course, workplace injuries that occur. And for workers' compensation, sorry, I'm just kind of skipping ahead a little bit to stay on track. But for workers' compensation, as we're familiar with, you know, you're talking about medical care, lost wages, settlement if there's a permanent disability, rehabilitation. Unfortunately, there can be burial or death benefits if there's a fatality. And historically, when you think of workers' compensation, you go back to the Industrial Revolution and it's called the Grand Bargain. And I just have a couple of just some of the historical clips or drawings of, you know, when you're thinking of the Industrial Revolution or these factories that are really unsafe. And you know, even child labor, things that would go on. And the problem with injuries during this time period is you'd have to go to court, and, you know, more or less, you've got – if you went to court, the company would argue contributory negligence, that, you know, it was your fault, you know, clearly you just weren't using the machine properly, or the fellow-servant doctrine, you know, the guy next to you wasn't using the machine properly. So you were assuming the risks. So the idea for workers' compensation was to have a grand bargain, and basically that would mean that you wouldn't be able to sue, and it would be an exclusive remedy, but what would end up happening is you'd go through the system that should be taking care of you. And, you know, it's been around for a long time, starting in Europe, Prussia back in the 1890s, going to England, looking at the United States for adopting workers' compensation rules. Wisconsin was one of the first in 1911. The final state, Mississippi, in 1948 actually shows how relatively new this is, and it does show also that there's room for growth and modification. So as far as the exclusive remedy in workers' compensation, you know, each state has its own rule. The employer, the company, purchases insurance. It's mandated to do so. The company pays a premium, you know, similar to other types of insurance. So, you know, select your insurance company, pay your premium, and then you've got your risk covered. And, you know, Illinois is just hundreds of insurers that will write policies for standard companies, for staffing companies. There's codes that basically determine the rates, and it's interesting, and this is where with staffing companies, you start to get into some gray areas, because clearly, you know, the code for somebody that's, you know, a roofer or doing painting is going to be higher than white-collar work. And when you're looking at, you know, staffing, and I won't get into the calculations, but, you know, a rate of, you know, $1.68 per $100,000 in payroll that goes into, you know, thousands could be less than someone that is a white-collar position. So these staffing companies, they're able to kind of use the system to their advantage, because, again, they can get a workers' compensation rate, but they can send people all over to a variety of jobs. So you may not know exactly where you're going to end up if you start at one of these companies. So for workers' compensation, you know, of course, the worker gets compensated timely fashion with the exclusive remedy, but the company can't be sued. And the idea is that the penalty is that these workers' compensation, you know, premiums, you could go up and up higher and higher, you know, thousands and thousands on your payroll, and that should stop companies from wanting to, you know, engage in risky and unsafe activity. But the problem, of course, is with staffing companies, you know, more or less, you can have a new staffing company that's just started at any point in time, and the general employer, they, you know, the big manufacturing company, they can just take workers from staffing companies and put them in risky positions, the riskiest positions, and then when the exclusive remedy comes time to go into play, you know, one, the big company can't get sued, and then two, as far as premiums go, they may not have a premium increase. So there's kind of been this loophole that's been found in the system, and that's where it's really dangerous with the exclusive remedy, and we need to have some solutions to that. So that's really the question. Does the high cost of workers' comp insurance induce companies to pay attention to worker safety? And when you look at, you know, the big staffing companies that are employing just hundreds of thousands per day and sending them out to different manufacturing companies and somebody that's showing up for the first day at a staffing company that really needs a job, they may not know where they're going to be sent and what they're going to be doing and what the training is. So the problem with the temp work is that, you know, the employers, the staffing agency, the workers, you know, the temporary worker, there's borrowing companies, there's host companies, where does the safety training begin? Injuries can happen at, you know, injuries happen clearly at the work site, which is at the, you know, the company that they're loaned to. So it's really, you know, it's really an interesting scenario and a complex scenario. And in Illinois, we're an exclusive remedy state, and that applies to both the staffing agency and the borrowing employer. So if your staffing agency doesn't train you, you can't sue them for personal injury, you can't sue the company that took you as a temp employee that didn't give you any training. So you have this gray area where you're borrowed by this exclusive remedy for suing for personal injury and you're really up to kind of the workers' comp system. And what's kind of scary on that is it's no matter how egregious the safety violation, the host employer is very likely not liable. And that, you know, so the only thing to push them is the possibly increased workers' comp premiums. And when you think about temp workers and how they get injured, and, you know, we were just looking at some unsafe work practices clips, but, you know, clearly, you know, the new guy that's not a formal employee, you can send them up on the roof without a harness, you can send them to go unjam the machine, you can, so with staffing companies, it's just a dangerous situation because they're, you know, not the long-term employee, they're just, you know, a new face and what are you going to do with that situation if you need a job and you're the new employee? So if you search around a little bit, there's a lot of information about the grand bargain and the grand bargain unraveling. And, you know, some of our goals with, we had started this as kind of a policy analysis and we were looking at examining statutes and case law in a few states and looking at can we change the exclusive remedy provision as it applies to temporary staffing agencies or some way to get relief for these temporary workers that are put into very unsafe situations? And trying to see what the current lay of the land is and if there are any other states out there, particularly in the Midwest that we were looking at that have solutions, and one possible thing is should you remove the exclusive remedy protection for host companies, you know, and as far as you're providing, you know, looking to provide safer workplaces. So one point in case on this is when we were looking at OSHA report forms where we all know how those are supposed to be filled out, I won't rehash, but, you know, a log is needed at each business and that's supposed to be the staffing company and where they're loaning them out to. So when you, you know, look at the statute, you're supposed to complete these reports and basically, you know, the borrowing employers are supposed to make, you know, good-faith record-keeping determinations and as we all know, what's a good-faith record-keeping determination? They may not put that down. They don't want to have an issue. And there's overlaps for like state and federal OSHA as you're loaning employees out. And it's just interesting and sorry as I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but, you know, requiring employer, you know, and there's even statutes in Illinois that are supposed to require the employers to provide safety training, protective equipment, and things like that. So when you look at academic studies on temp workers, they're looking for the exclusive remedy provision and how this is impacting, there's really a lot of limited data. I mean, when you look overall just, you know, the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, you know, they'll say that in a given year there's going to be thousands of fatal occupational injuries, you know, worker deaths, you know, every hour or two. But when you start looking at temporary workers, it's tough to get that data because, again, they're not there that long. They may just work for an agency for a few days. They may get injured and leave and not do it again. But in general, the temp workers are younger, newer to the jobs. They've got higher compensation claim rates than their peers. And they don't report minor injuries. So if the OSHA logs aren't put together right, they may not report minor injuries. And then that's where you really run into some problems. So there's been studies in Washington State, for example, that was looking at a cohort of 53 employees that were injured and only 19 were on the lot. So, you know, 30%. So that's where you, you know, really, you know, run into some serious issues. So, you know, just to skip ahead a little bit to look at some of the state laws. So Illinois is an exclusive remedy state. So basically, more or less, you've got joint and several liability, which basically means you can go after either the staffing agency or the, you know, the barring employer, but only under workers comp for that joint and several liability. And I've got some cases and things in here for anyone who's interested. We want to make sure there's material because I think this is an emerging area and there needs to be a lot of legislation and some research and changes. Just talking about, you know, how these are going and how there's really not an out to go sue under personal injury laws. One interesting bright spot that was actually taken away was the state of Wisconsin. And just jumping ahead a little bit on that, there was a case in Ray's state of Rivera where there was a worker that was injured in a vehicle crash. And what ended up happening was they were able to sue for personal injury and get out of the workers comp system. And they were there, the statute in Wisconsin, it was read as whoever makes a claim for compensation must go through the workers comp system. And the Rivera, their attorneys didn't go through the workers comp system. They just went straight to court for personal injury. And they wanted to assume that risk and go outside the grand bargain. And they prevailed. And it was, you know, it was a great kind of a solution to this type of an issue. The only thing is that, of course, as soon as they went through that, the large employers, the staffing companies lobbied, and then there were changes under the administration to go pass laws to close that loophole. And then, you know, just very briefly, you know, some other states, state of Michigan, for example, they have an economic reality test to see, you know, who's controlling the employer, or sorry, the employee, and really looking at those types of things to see are they really a temp agency, you know, being, you know, being loaned, things like that. So there's a bunch of different options that are kind of going around. Every state's a little different. And, you know, again, it's just really with staffing companies, you're dealing with individuals that could be more at risk that you'll hear about in a little bit. And, you know, trying to find out is there any way to make the exclusive remedy work well, to make the grand bargain continue to work well, but also to make, you know, to make sure that people aren't trying to abuse this or use this as a loophole. So I think that's really the concern. And with that, since I think I'm out of time, I'll turn this over. And if we've got some time, I can talk a little more on it. But, you know, again, I think there's a lot of work to be done in this sector and a lot of legislation to be looked at and passed. Thanks. I'm sorry to be the bad guy here. And I hope people will stick around. It's your turn to be the bad guy. Okay. And I hope you'll stick around for questions because I really wanted to reserve time in the session for questions. So I also have nothing to disclose. Some of the work was funded by NIOSH in our surveillance grant. Oh, wait, how do I make that show to you? Did you get? I don't know what I did. Do you know how to do it? Sorry. We froze. What did you do? I'm sorry, guys. You get started. Okay. So I have no disclosure to make. But we have a surveillance grant that did some of this work. And then we have a total worker health grant as well from NIOSH. And we've done some work on temp staffing as well. Cancel, cancel. Oh, there you go. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. So there are about 3 million temp and contract employees in U.S. staffing in an average week. 73% of them are full time. And in a survey of them, about 64% of those workers say that they are doing this between jobs and they cite about 20% site schedule flexibility as a reason for doing temp employment in the first place. This is data from the American Staffing Association which turns out to be the best data except they don't give us very much on their website. But I chose the U.S. overall, the state of Illinois, because that's where we work and we have data from and the state of Pennsylvania because we're here in Philadelphia today. So there are about 3 million workers per week in temp staffing across the U.S. out of the 166 million workforce in the U.S. In Illinois, there are about 166,000 out of the 6.1 million workforce. And Pennsylvania you see is 105,000, so much lower temp staffing presence compared to other states. Illinois is the fifth largest state and I think Pennsylvania is the sixth largest state in the United States. So annually there are about 16 million staffing employees across the U.S. and they're hard to count because the question is whether you're counting people or gigs and time figures into that. So these numbers are difficult, but you see what their average annualized wage is, which is pretty low, but consider the fact that this is annualized and a lot of these folks aren't working for a whole year consecutively. There are about 1,600 sites where temp staffing workers work in Illinois and about 1,400 in Pennsylvania. So contrary to what I thought when I started this, most temp staffing workers, at least in our state, they work in really hazardous occupations. It's not the Kelly Services secretaries, but rather people are working in transportation and material moving as well as manufacturing. So those are the orange and yellow lines consecutively and you can look at the rates and the top line is overall. There was some downturn right before the pandemic and I don't have data later than that. And so we tried to look at our workers' compen- or sorry, this is BLS data as well. So in this slide we're looking at sociodemographic determinants. So you see across the top women, white, black, or African American, Asian, Hispanic, Latino, and in the top line it's the total number of employees and then if you go down each column, you see in gray the percent of employees in that category. So if you look at the black or African American column, there are 12% African Americans in the Illinois workforce, but they're overrepresented in all of these sectors in temp staffing. So in transportation and material moving occupations, they are 19% of those workers that are temp workers are black African American and 24% are Latino. So you see that they're way overrepresented. Disadvantaged populations are way overrepresented in temp staffing. If you look at their wages, they're also problematic. So the temp staffing workers are in blue and the non-temp are in the dark yellow and the proportion of wages that temp make over non-temp is in the very light yellow. So you can see that the average wage, for example, in transportation and material moving is about $14.40 in temp and $20 in non-temp. So temp staffing workers make about 72% of the wages of workers that are directly hired in transportation and warehousing. And if you look at workers' comp claims, they also differ in a lot of ways and mostly the workers' comp awarded to temp staffing employees that get injured at work, since it's based on their wages, their average weekly wage, they get paid out a lot less when they file for workers' compensation. But there are a lot of data and Mike showed data right at the beginning of the fact that temp staffing workers have a very high rate of severe injury compared to non-temp staffing workers. In Illinois we see a lot of first day on the job kind of injuries. I saw a case about three years ago of an 18 year old woman who amputated eight fingers the first day of her job in manufacturing in temp. So it's horrifying and really requires attention. And the risk of hazardous work comes from the sectors that they're working in and then it's amplified by the fact that they're doing very hazardous jobs, often without training and protective equipment. And so they're at a total disadvantage in that realm. So I wanted to just summarize all of that and point out that all of that is to say that temp jobs are unstable, temp workers are employed in high risk industries, they have a higher risk of injury because of the sector and also because of lack of training and oversight. They make lower wages in every sector of the economy except for the white collar jobs. Their workers payouts are a lot lower because it's based on average weekly wage and then they're demographically over represented by African Americans and Latinx or Hispanic workers. So employment protections are often lost in the temp arrangement. Job stability, paid sick leave and all of that compound these problems. So to move over to potential solutions in ways of approaching this from a public health perspective, I wanted to talk about surveillance. Surveillance as Jeff and I think Mike pointed out is quite difficult in temp staffing because these workers are not counted directly in any of the databases that we use to count these injuries. So this is typical surveillance, blah blah which you guys all know so I won't go through the CDC graphic. But you need to have data in order to say anything about your protections or any of the interventions that you're doing. So you know that the BLS survey of occupational illnesses and injuries selects a stratified sample of employers by industry and size in each state and requests that the selected employers keep their OSHA 300 log very well for the year and then give that back to the BLS and they have very good success in getting that back and then the BLS weights the sample and tells you how many injuries there are in the various economic sectors in the United States. But temp staffing workers aren't captured because OSHA 300 logs do not call out which of the workers in a factory are temp and which ones are directly hired. There is no line on the OSHA 300 log to record that so the only way OSHA knows that is if there's a bad injury and OSHA goes into the workplace like there's an amputation or a fall or a death or a hospitalization or an eye enucleation and they go into the workplace to investigate that and then in the course of discussion, they find out that this worker was a TEMP worker. So in summary, data is very sparse for TEMP staffing workers. BLS doesn't capture it. The OSHA 300 log doesn't capture it. There really isn't a way to report it. And the way we got that data is because in our surveillance program in the state of Illinois, we're able to get workers' compensation data. And so we can know, since the TEMP company covers the workers' compensation for TEMP staffing workers, then we can know the number of TEMP staffing workers that filed for workers' compensation during that. And all the data that I showed you from Illinois, much of the data comes from that. So if we don't have data, it's hard to figure out where the problems are. After the National Academies report, which was published in 2018, I want to say, and brought together this think tank of people that do occupational illness and injury surveillance, and of course, they addressed the strengths and weaknesses of the current system. And the way data is captured and reported in each of these systems was found to be problematic, and they recommended a bigger and better surveillance system in the United States. So in terms of TEMP staffing specifically, I would recommend these things, that both the host and the borrowing company have to keep OSHA 300 logs. That if the TEMP staffing company does not have to report to OSHA, then we're not going to know those numbers. So you could also change the OSHA 300 log and have a line that has TEMP so that the host employer has to check that off if it's a TEMP staffing. So one or the other or both, and if it were both, you could corroborate those. Also having all OSHA 300 logs submitted to, you know, to OSHA from every company, not just the BLS companies, would be a good thing, and I think that was on track to happen and got aborted, and I don't know the exact status of that right now. And then the OSHA 300 logs, you know, there's a total disconnect, of course, between workers' compensation and OSHA, and it, you know, employers and OSHA and insurance companies, there's so many interests in this area that there's conflict, really, around sharing this kind of information that I think doesn't serve workers. So that's all I'm going to say. So I'm happy to take questions. I'm actually a contract worker for three different companies, so this was very interesting from a personal standpoint, but I'm also an editor with Workplace Health and Safety, which is the Journal for the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses, and I would love to solicit an article from one or all of you. So I would like your email information so I could send you our guidelines for publication, because I think it would help you publicize some of this very important information. Thank you. I would love that. Great talks. Michael Hodgson. I'm actually in the Office of Occupational Medicine and Nursing at OSHA. The 300 log submission was part of the initial record-keeping rule draft. It was rejected, you know, removed under the next-to-last administration. It was on hold during the last administration. The current version of the rule, the internal rule on reporting, is that high-risk NAICS codes with more than 100 employees will have to submit their 300 log to the injury tracking application. That rule is currently, you know, in revision, and who knows whether it'll get appealed, but it is on track in some way, but it won't deal with the issue of staffing agencies' abilities to dilute the rate of injury and, therefore, escape that cross-checking. Thank you. Hi. Steve Frangos. I'm with Baker Hughes. Hi. Steve Frangos. I'm with Baker Hughes. A question that comes to mind for me is, with temporary workers, why would we, and I guess this is born from a recent injury that I dealt with where it was an employee on the first day of work that was injured, and, you know, from not following procedures, they needed to do more training and more orientation. So, why would you not, with temporary workers, put them through the same rigor that you would an employee from a safety standpoint? Like, I'm assuming some of these injuries, you know, might be ergonomic injuries, so they're sitting at somebody else's desk and the desk isn't ever adjusted for them or they, you know, they don't, they're not given the opportunity to create a safe environment at the beginning, and they don't get support to do that at the beginning of their work. So, I mean, it's a travesty, I think, if people are getting injured in their first day or two because it seems like an easy fix. I mean, the short answer is profit, but the slightly longer answer is from the host employer's perspective, you know, this is a temporary assignment. They don't really reap the consequences if that worker gets injured. They can get another worker in the next day to replace that worker. You know, from the staffing agency's perspective, while they don't really want to have their workers get injured by the host employer's negligence, on the other hand, they don't want to lose a key client. It's a very competitive industry. There's a lot of competition between staffing agencies to land good clients. And so there's, you know, there comes to be a sort of evil arrangement between the two sides where neither side really wants to get in the other's business. And some of the effort that we're trying to make in Washington State is to close that gap and force that relationship to work, to protect the workers. You know, and I may comment on that as well, and I mean, I think that really goes to the heart of the, you know, the grand bargain and just the exclusive arrangement with workers' compensation, where if this has become a gray area with staffing companies, then just as in Washington State and other states, there needs to be legislation that recognizes that the current system, the economic model, has made it such that everybody's trying to use this as a gray area for some of the more dangerous positions, and they're taking advantage very often of the most vulnerable populations doing this type of staffing and temp work. So certainly, I think it's important that we start highlighting it, which we're doing. It'll be great to get some publications and just continue to put the spotlight on this, and then legislate a solution. So I mean, there has to be a better way, it's really the big thing, and that's the hope. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. So I don't really have a question, but I am on the board for our local ASSP chapter. So from the safety and health perspective, I empathize, sympathize from the training perspective of temporary workers. So I can say that they are trained to the same level of full-time employees, but what's happening currently from, since I'll do like, I feel like we're saying everything from pre and post-COVID time, what's currently happening, and we're trying to work with this too with our EHS representatives, with our local ASSP as well. So the documents I saw, I know what you're talking about, is trying to get with the amount of turnover of temporary workers, that has been a challenge. And from our C-suites and our plant managers and our board of directors, our EHS reps now are being forced from what was the amount of time they're given for our staffing and training is now being diminished. And then what happened was a full day of training, they're now given two hours for core OSHA regulatory compliance trainings, and then they're pushed out on the floor for people. So we're given time restraints, and it's very challenging for our EHS reps. So we're trying to work hand-in-hand with our temp agencies as well as the EHS reps to make sure that they're still given the proper training that our full-time people are, and then with the turnover challenges. So I absolutely understand what's happening with this, and we are trying to bridge those gaps with people. And for the amputation, that employee should not have been on the floor or handling equipment until they were trained on the policies. That would happen. That one bothered me. I have to disagree with you that this is happening all over. It's not happening in a lot of places. That's why these injuries are occurring. We see them. When they're really bad injuries, we see them. So you're working for a good company that is working with ethical employers, although the shrinkage of time for training doesn't sound very good, but you're coming from a very standard perspective. And there are so many fly-by-night temp staffing companies, it's shocking. They just go in and out of business. When there are injuries, they go out of business. They change their name. They're a different staffing company. There are staffing companies that are vans that drive up and down the street in the city of Chicago, I know for sure, and they solicit workers on the street to come and do a day's work through a formal temporary staffing arrangement. So it's really a hodgepodge, and even this, you know, the formalized temporary staffing has a lot of informal aspects to it. So we see so many a first day and first five days on the job severe injuries. Those people are not being trained and they're not being protected, I'll just say. If there's a way we could try to bridge that gap with ASSP to try to fix this problem, the workers are the first and foremost, our priority. So I would love to make that happen. Same. Good. Let's stay in touch. She should be on the NORA committee. I was going to say, actually, before I sign her up, ASSP is one of the co-branding partners for that post-employer document. And we're currently in talks with ASSP to actually turn this into an ANSI registered technical report from ASSP, which is its own process, but we're sort of in the beginning of that. So we're getting help. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really important topic. Great presentations. Kathy Fagan. And I used to be on the NORA Service Sector Committee, so yay. Yay. I kind of lost track of the issue of the worker who was able to sue and whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. If you could go through that just a little bit, that one case that you talked about, I guess, and what your point was, because I kind of lost track. Oh. Okay. Definitely. And I apologize for going a little quickly through. Originally we had put together a policy presentation on this that was an hour-long talk, and I wanted to make sure the slides were available. But so in general, as we said, you have the Exclusive Remedy Agreement, and everybody's really locked in. But there are some states that allow for a little bit of wiggle room. In the one case in Wisconsin, I think, that you're referring to, in Ray Rivera, what ended up happening is the statute, when it was read, said that if you go through workers' compensation, then that is the exclusive remedy. So in this case, the injured workers' attorneys had an interesting thought and said, well, let's not start the workers' compensation process. We're not going to file a claim. We're just going to go straight to court and file a personal injury case. And the courts agreed, and they said, well, it seems like you have a choice here. So it was a very interesting take. And as you can imagine, for the large employers and the lobbying and the staffing companies in Wisconsin, they wanted that closed immediately. And definitely, that would certainly cause some issues with the exclusive remedy. But I almost wonder if there's a lot of ideas for solutions, but if you're dealing with staffing companies and there's not proper training and there's this gray area, is that something to put in there to allow for personal injury law to come into play and to regulate it properly so it's not just up for grabs, but something along the lines of having a solution so that if somebody does get horribly injured and they're not trained and they're a loaned or borrowed employee and it's getting into these weird areas, that maybe there is another pathway that they can activate. So. My name is Mallory Plank. I'm a nurse practitioner, and I see a lot of temp agency workers. And I'm not going to lie. It's usually a bit of a groan that comes out of my mouth when I see that on my list. Because it's often somewhat disenfranchised folks. They need the job. They need the work. But they are kind of poorly trained, and they're probably doing unpleasant jobs. So I've got several questions. First of all, in light, you were talking about the whole OSHA 300 log. I find that sometimes, even if it's like a sprained ankle, they can't walk on it. So I want to give them work restrictions. It immediately seems to knock them out. It seems to take them off work. So one of my questions is, why can't temp agencies accommodate work restrictions? Is it that they can't or that they won't? And then, do they care about time off? And why are they so hard to communicate with? When I have a difficult situation, they really are like, oh, okay. They just are really hard to accommodate and work with. I don't know. This might be a little out of the scope of this. Right. Well, I mean, part of the problem with the staffing agency problem, it's really part of their core part of their business, is they send workers out to host employers. They don't have, like, they aren't like a large company, like a Boeing or something that could have some light work duties to allow a worker to come back, you know, part-time. If they, there is some variation in this. But usually, if the worker is lightly injured, but really can't, you know, the staffing agency doesn't have a book of assignments that that worker could perform, the host employer certainly would not appreciate being sent a worker that couldn't do the job that they were asking and paying for. Then they just set the worker, they just don't send the worker out. And unfortunately, there, yeah, it eliminates that ability to use light work duties to keep them working and engaged in the work. But temp staffing, the staffing company has to keep paying them workers' comp. Yes. Until they recover. Right. And so what happens frequently is that they're kept on workers' comp, and then the minute they get the doctor's note or the nurse practitioner note that says they can go back to work, they don't get placed again. So they don't have to fire them. Because that isn't how the temp staffing agent works. They have to place them either back at the company that they were working or at another company. But they're not legally bound to do that. So the minute they're not, the minute they're no longer disabled, they don't get rehired. They don't have to be fired. And I should just add that on workers' comp, when they get wage benefits, they're usually capped at two-thirds of their weekly average, which was probably already pretty low. So it's often too little to work to. This is part of the reason why they don't want to file, oftentimes, for relatively minor injuries. Hey, y'all, I'm Todd Hamill from Houston. I know we're at the end, 1230, and I'll just be brief, but really appreciate this. Michael, I'm sorry I missed most of yours, but you guys are representing out of order coast to coast. And so what I do is nationwide take care of workers that are both in big industry, medium-sized companies, small companies, many of them contract companies. And so I get involved with those contractors then serving anyone, Exxon or anyone nationwide. And so it's fascinating because you're talking about temp agencies, temp staffing, but these contractors, they're not getting any care. And often, my interaction with them is the only care that they're getting, primary or occupationally. And it's specifically very niche. I'm doing respirator medical approvals nationwide. So in doing last year and doing 170,000 through my company, the opportunity is there to mitigate so much risk, to improve so much health. And I was wondering if you guys or with me, if you'd like to maybe put a session together for next year's AOHC where we could then talk about that segment of the population because the needs are unmet and they're huge. Let's talk. Sounds good. Sure. Yeah. Thank you. I'll try to be brief. It looks like most of the questions are coming from the perspective of private employers working with staffing companies. What happens when the host company, quote unquote, is a federal agency, a DOD component, Army, Navy? So you are on a federal enclave, which means you have federal supremacy that supersedes state laws. How does that affect the temporary worker who might be working in a warehouse at an Army base and gets injured on federal site? I don't think I know the answer to that exactly. Do you know the answer to that? I don't know the answer explicitly, if anyone else knows on that, but I mean, I can guess that standard workers' compensation processes, but... Yeah. So I used to be in charge of the employee occupational health system for the Veterans Health Administration. So any worker on federal property who is working under supervision of a federal agency with a supervisor has the right to file a federal workers' compensation claim through the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs. And then there's a complex process in OWCP. They have to find the claims filing process at their local Army base or VA hospital. There's often a more adversarial process there than we would like, but they have the right to file that claim. Thank you. If they don't get that claim filed, there's now a thing called the e-comp system, which is an electronic workers' comp claims filing system throughout the federal government that's run by the Department of Labor. So they should have a local contact that will file their e-comp claim that runs that through the system. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah. I've never seen a claim come with a site of being a federal location in our state system, so that accords with what Michael was just saying. Great. Yeah. All right. Well... I think we're done. Thank you. Come with us if you want to talk about this stuff or work on it.

temporary staffing workers

protection

high risk

inadequate training

low wages

employment stability

disadvantaged populations

exclusive remedy provision

unsafe working conditions

legislation