Between Prison and Precarity: LA Warehouse Workers and the Probation/Staffing Agency Nexus

Warehouses are crucial nodes in the networks of goods movement that constitute today’s just-in-time supply chains and  a large sector of LA’s economy anchored by the ports of LA and Long Beach. They also are important employers of low-wage workers of color who perform manual labor under difficult conditions.* Warehouses are well known for employing particularly vulnerable workers, including immigrant and formerly incarcerated workers, and for relying heavily on temporary staffing agencies to evade employment law obligations and suppress worker organizing.* This research project will explore an important but unstudied mechanism for creating and exploiting worker vulnerability to precarious work: the recruitment of workers who are under criminal justice supervision (probation, parole, and their variants) and thus under pressure to maintain employment or be (re)incarcerated.