The Chicago Reporter

It seems like there was an era in America where there was a general contract between employers and employees. Employees work hard and dedicate their careers to helping a company earn a profit. In return, employers are loyal to those employees, offering them insurance, workers' comp, and the general expectation of being taken care of in exchange for your work.

That contract, if it ever existed, has been severely weakened. Some might even say it's been broken. ARISE Chicago, a collaboration between faith groups and local workers to fight labor injustice, is bringing to light the ways in which employers no longer feel obligated to offer their employees anything except a meager wage... and sometimes, not even that.

Jamie Hayes at ARISE recently brought some of these cases to light on the group's blog, Dignity at Work. She describes two local workers, both getting little in return for their hard work.

The first is Margarita, a woman who worked at an Albany Park laundromat for two years. She worked over 40 hours, 7 days a week and earned $5 an hour. When Margarita looked to ARISE for help, the organization contacted her employer, saying the company had to pay Margarita at least the minimum wage and give her one day to rest, according to the law.

The employer's answer? Margarita was an "independent contractor."

"Since Margarita could not make her own schedule, perform her work autonomously, nor bid out the work (the basic marks of a truly independent contractor), this defense was fairly preposterous," Hayes writes.

Another company asked window-washer and gutter-cleaner Luis to become his own corporation and sign on as an independent contractor. He was never allowed to set his own hours, take his own clients or bid out parts of the job. When Luis fell off a roof at one of his jobs, the company settled with him out of court, knowing their contracts wouldn't hold up in workers compensation court. When he came back to work, he was forced to sign an even tighter contract and buy his own workers comp insurance.

"Workers get to keep 50 percent of the cut, but must also provide their own transportation, pay for their own gas, cover any damages to homes, pay twice as much in tax as employees, and pay out their assistants," writes Hayes. "At the end of the day, sometimes workers barely make enough money to cover their expenses."

Are employers responsible for anything anymore? It seems that workers in all fields are being made into independent contractors. An economist at George Mason University found that the number of independent contractors rose by more than 1 million since 2005. And the recession has made this trend worse - with many jobless unable to find traditional employment and taking contract work instead.

The trend is alive and well in journalism, for sure. It's tough these days to find a company that both wants you to write for them and take responsibility for you and your work. Health insurance? Protection from libel suits? Good luck. I even recently had a boss at the Chicago Public Schools who tried to pressure me into becoming an independent contractor, even though they determined exactly what I taught, when I taught and who could sub for me. Why? Because it was cheaper for them.

But if employees don't like it, they should go elsewhere, right? That might hold for some employees, writes Hayes, but certainly not for many city workers.

"In today's economy, workers who are often recently arrived immigrants, often lacking knowledge of English and U.S. labor law, feel that they have no other choice but to continue in an abusive employment relationship, especially as more and more employers catch on to this new trend of passing market and health safety risks on to the worker, while they collect all the profits," says Hayes.

What are we going to do about this? Is there a way to repair this broken employee/employer relationship? Or will we all be independent contractors one day, with even the mayor of Chicago buying his own workers' comp insurance in case he trips on an uneven piece of sidewalk shaking hands with his citizens?

Tell us what you think and what you're experiencing out in the workplace.

Photo credit: Beth Rankin