This piece was produced by the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica, in partnership with Marketplace. Reporter Michael Grabell followed buses and vans from the early-morning pickups in Chicago to the warehouses in the far suburbs, and conducted more than 60 interviews with workers, raiteros, temp agency recruiters, managers of check-cashing stores, and others. The ProPublica team examined check stubs, court records, labor department files, and undercover video shot by the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative, an advocacy group that opposes some temp agency practices.
Temp agencies use similar van networks in other labor markets. But in Chicago’s Little Village, the largest Mexican community in the midwest, the raiteros have melded with temp agencies and their corporate clients in a way that might be unparalleled anywhere in America—and could violate Illinois’s wage laws.
Like other workers, Castro said she has never been to Select Remedy, the temp agency that officially employs her. She knows Ty only as los peluches, Spanish for “the stuffed animals.”
Yet the agencies provide applications so the raiteros can recruit workers. They call raiteros with the number of workers needed at each work site. At the end of the week, the raiteros pick up the workers’ paychecks from the temp agencies and bring them to check-cashing stores, where workers are charged $3 to $4 to cash them. In some cases, the raiteros say, the temp firms even provide the vans they use to drive workers to their jobs, or lend them money to buy the vans.
Tania Lundeen, Ty’s vice president of sales, said, “We typically don’t do any kind of interviews.” No one from Ty responded to a list of questions.
In other parts of the country, the van systems have clearer ties to the temp agencies and the fees are legal, with some restrictions.
