National Employment Law Project – WHO’S THE BOSS: – Restoring Accountability for Labor Standards in Outsourced Work. Catherine Ruckelshaus, Rebecca Smith, Sarah Leberstein, Eunice Cho. May 2014.

“Business outsourcing is on the rise, through practices such as multi-layered contracting, use of staffing or temp firms, franchising, misclassifying employees as independent contractors, and other means. The label on a worker’s uniform and the brand on the outside of the establishment where the work occurs may not match the business name on the paycheck or the company that recruits and hires that same worker. Lead companies that outsource distance themselves from the labor-intensive parts of their businesses and their responsibilities for those workers. While some of these outsourcing practices reflect more efficient ways of producing goods and services, others are the result of explicit employer strategies to evade labor laws and worker benefits. This restructuring of employment arrangements may well foreshadow a future of work different from the employer- employee paradigm around which many of our labor standards were constructed, but it should not spell the end of living wage jobs or business responsibility for work and workers.This report describes some of the organizational shifts in the way businesses operate, profiles some of the leading lower-wage service sectors where these outsourced structures have taken hold, and describes how these changes can result in poor working conditions and a lack of corporate responsibility.”