The Exploitative Mechanisms of Precarious Work: National Insights and New Orleans’ Worker VOICES
By Lulit Shewan, in collaboration with the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice
Across the country, temporary and contingent workers are essential to local economies, yet structurally excluded from stability, safety, and accountability.
CLASP’s new report, The Exploitative Mechanisms of Precarious Work: National Insights and New Orleans’ Worker Voices, examines how subcontracting, staffing intermediaries, and enforcement gaps create a labor system defined by invisibility and risk-shifting. Through national data and testimonies from event-based workers in New Orleans, this report documents how wage theft, administrative dysfunction, racialized exclusion, and unsafe conditions are not anomalies, but design features of the modern temp economy.
With nearly one in four temporary workers reporting wage theft and federal enforcement capacity at historic lows, the need for structural reform is urgent. The report outlines concrete federal, state, and municipal policy solutions—from equal pay and transparency standards to stronger recordkeeping and enforcement infrastructure—alongside strategies to center worker-driven accountability.