Strengthen Contracted Workers’ Rights and Employer Accountability

Employers often use contracted labor arrangements to shed responsibility for job quality. NELP works to ensure that employers are accountable to every worker powering their businesses.

Who Are Contracted Workers?

More than 26 million people—around one in six U.S. workers—are working as independent contractors, temp and staffing agency workers, or contract firm workers.

Companies “contract out” labor by hiring workers as independent contractors or by hiring through labor subcontractors such as temp agencies. The problem is that many companies “contract out” to avoid their responsibilities to:

Pay into Social Security and other social insurance systems.
Comply with wage and other labor standards.

Contracting Away Workers’ Rights

The practice of “contracting out” labor shifts the costs of doing business onto individual workers or third-party (likely smaller) businesses, often degrading wages and working conditions.

Corporate use of contracted labor shifts power away from working people. And it is a driver of occupational segregation and racial and gender inequality, because businesses often place people of color, immigrants, and women into the lowest-quality contracted jobs.

Contracted Work: Stats & Figures

23M

people—15% of all U.S. workers—are engaged as independent contractors.

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temp and staffing agency jobs are held by U.S. workers in any given month.

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1M+

U.S. workers are hired through contract companies annually.

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Fighting for Good Jobs in All Work Relationships

For decades, NELP has worked to expose the labor subcontracting strategies, including independent contractor misclassification, that employers use to evade responsibility to workers. We advance policies ensuring that all workers have access to good jobs with good benefits, regardless of how their job is structured.

We work with partners on local, state, and federal policy campaigns to:

Ensure that employers are accountable to the workers who power their businesses.
Ensure that all workers, including contracted workers, are covered by core labor and employment rights, and advocate for more enforcement by government agencies.
Raise labor standards for temp staffing agency workers, and ensure that they receive pay, benefits, and protections on par with their direct-hire counterparts.
Raise labor standards for app-based workers and demand transparency from app-based companies around how they are collecting and using workers’ data.