The Vultures of the Job Market
Everett labor organizers expose the predatory practices of private employment agencies that steal from the city's most vulnerable job seekers.
The story, cleaned up
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The private employment office is fast becoming a public nuisance. These offices should be a happy medium between the workingman out of a job and the employer shy of help, but human vultures have seen in this business a chance to skin the laborer and are crowding honest men out. A laborer recently came to the Journal office and told his story: he had paid $1.50 to a Seattle agency for a job near Snohomish, but was told upon arrival in Everett that no such job existed. When he asked for a refund, the proprietor threw his receipt into the stove. The local police chief tried to deny the agency a license, but the city council, stampeded by the city attorney’s opinion that a license could not be denied, folded. There is also a rumor that mill foremen work a system with these agencies: they hire men for two days, lay them off, and then demand the agency send more to keep the fees flowing. In the absence of state law to curb these practices, public opinion must step in to force these predators to be good or go out of business.
“What can be more mean or contemptuous than to fatten like a vulture off the necessities of a laboring man?”
The 1909 struggle against predatory temp agencies and 'pay-to-play' job schemes resonates with today's debates over gig economy precarity and the ethics of intermediary labor platforms. While the specific legal mechanisms of 'employment licenses' have changed, the fundamental imbalance of power between those gatekeeping work and those desperate for a wage remains a recurring feature of the Everett labor landscape.
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