The Star obtained the names and addresses of Ontario’s 2,588 temp agency accounts registered at the WSIB. Using Google Earth, we looked up over 450 of them in the GTA.

Paying cash is not illegal if the appropriate deductions are made and pay stubs are issued — but rigorous government enforcement is essential, says Regini David of West Scarborough Community Legal Services.

The GTA is home to more temp agencies than seven Canadian provinces combined

More than a hundred appeared to be residential addresses, including suburban homes or condo buildings. Around a dozen were simply a P.O. box or were registered to a UPS mailbox service. We visited two addresses, including one 13 floors above the Star’s newsroom at One Yonge St., that were “virtual offices” receiving mail for a dozen agencies. At least one listed address was an empty plot of land.

David says that can be bad news for workers.

“When there’s unpaid wages, it’s really hard for them to get at (these temp agencies). The phone numbers change, even the location changes. And even when they are there, they are NOT there. Their office is not open,” says David.

It also means that authorities lose their leverage when trying to enforce the law, notes the University of Ottawa’s Katherine Lippel, who specializes in health and safety legal issues and workers’ compensation.

For example, the WSIB can ultimately seize a factory if it fails to pay its insurance premiums. But that doesn’t work when a temp agency’s only real asset may be a cellphone.

“Because these organizations are in somebody’s basement, the usual tools to provide incentives to respect the law don’t work so well,” says Lippel.

In an interview with the Star for this story, Minister of Labour Kevin Flynn said he, too, is concerned about how the industry is evolving — and how to hold bad actors accountable.

“As a ministry, we would be concerned that someone could pack up very quickly, avoid any liabilities they have, and open up down the road the next day.”

Who’s the boss?

Even after I wash my white lab coat, an insistent, yeasty smell clings to it. A badge on the coat’s left breast has “Fiera Foods” emblazoned in purple italics on it.

Workers here have been recruited by posters in north Toronto bus stations, or referred to temp agencies by friends. Some are financing school, others need an injection of cash.

But the most common reason I hear is simple: workers are here to survive.

Many Fiera employees are people of colour, many of them new immigrants. Some of them are young workers saving up money for school, while others just simply need a paycheque. Sara Mojtehedzadeh

At least, notes one woman I work with, you don’t have to wait by the phone each morning hoping for a shift — unlike other temp agency gigs. Some have been at Fiera regularly for months as “temps,” one for over a year.

The ladder to a permanent job, which would mean higher pay and benefits, seems slippery. At one point, my floor supervisor tells me there are jobs available for “people like me.” When I ask HR if there are any openings, I am told there is “nothing specific” available. I don’t personally meet any permanent employees except for my lead hand, although I’m told some of the women who relieve us on breaks might also be permanent.

According to Fiera, temp agency employment gives workers the flexibility to “accommodate family and other life obligations.”

We aren’t paid when we are sick. We aren’t told if we are working the weekend until the last minute. One colleague tells me she is miserable on a new production line; her supervisor will not let her go to the bathroom.

Although we start work at 2:30 p.m., many women arrive at least half an hour early. Getting a good place on the line is important. We take lunch one by one starting at around 4:30 p.m., which means the people who go earliest then have to stand for almost the rest of the shift.

Working at Fiera is better than nothing, one woman tells me, but in her country, factories are not like this.

“They like to drain you in this Canada,” she says.

The factory is packed with industrial equipment, boxes, metal racks and the floors are extremely slippery. Sara Mojtehedzadeh

Cameras are placed in hallways and break rooms, and trained on every production line, which Fiera says is a safety measure. A co-worker warns me not to be too chatty or take my phone out lest it be caught on video.

I take to sitting in a smaller break room, which some women prefer because it is quieter and there are fewer men. There is a locker room here, which permanent workers appear to use. The bathrooms are cleaner, even though all the doors but one are broken. Temps don’t get lockers, so we keep our valuables in our lab coat pockets and leave the rest of our things on open bag racks.

When machines jam up and production halts, women rub each other’s shoulders or crouch on the floor. A fistfight breaks out between the men because of a dispute over dough racks. On another night, a shouting match erupts because one man accuses another of not working hard enough.

Sara tries to call in sick.

“F--- you,” the man yells back. “I’m breaking my body.”

A young temp worries for the older women on the line; the long hours are too much, and people have family obligations. Then she shakes her head.

“People do desperate things,” she says, “when they have no choice.”

This month, new legislation aimed at protecting precarious workers will go to second reading at Queen’s Park. Labour advocates have been fighting for some of the proposed changes — including a higher minimum wage and paid sick days for all workers — for years.

Bill 148’s measures include more resources for enforcement, and greater protections for temp agency workers. If successful, it will make it easier for them to unionize and prohibit companies from paying them less than permanent counterparts doing the same work.

“I think probably the No. 1 thing that really comes out of it is the protections that these folks will have and the incentive for using temporary help workers in the first place,” Flynn, the labour minister, says. “I think a lot of it will be gone.”

But some workers’ advocates say the bill does not go far enough on temp agencies.

“There are so many loopholes that you could drive a bus through them,” says Deena Ladd of the Workers’ Action Centre.

For one, Ladd says the equal pay for equal work language is too weak. The bill only mandates equal pay for “substantially” similar work, which Ladd says could allow companies to fudge job descriptions to preserve pay imbalances between temporary and permanent employees.

In the case of my production line at Fiera, the changes wouldn’t make a difference. Except for people with supervisory roles, no one appears to be permanent. The new law does not include any caps on how many temp agency workers a company can hire, or time limits on how long they can be made to work in the same job at the same workplace as a “temp.”

The bill also does not directly address injury liability — one of the most significant financial incentives to use temp agencies. The new measures do not explicitly make client companies and temp agencies both responsible if a worker gets hurt on the job.

When asked about how current laws actually create incentive for companies to use temp agencies to avoid liability for accidents, Flynn said: “We know that’s not the right way of doing it in the long run and we need to work with the WSIB, I think, to get a better system in place.”

Some changes are already underway. Previously, the temp agency sector had its own insurance rate at the WSIB, which was lower than many high-risk industries. That, critics said, provided companies with an incentive to assign dangerous work to temps and give safer jobs to permanent hires, whose injuries would have costly implications at the compensation board.

The WSIB will eliminate that loophole, which it says will “go a long way towards making sure every business in Ontario takes safety seriously.” But the changes will not take effect until 2019. Even then, temp agencies will remain workers’ legal employer for the purposes of injury claims.

Some experts question why.

“Temp agencies used to be just labour brokers,” says the University of Waterloo’s MacEachen. “They weren’t actually employers. They fought tooth and nail to get this designation because it has some advantages for them.”

“(But) they have no control over work conditions. It’s bizarre.”

‘They know you’re replaceable’

After my month undercover, I meet with Sam Byjoo — a former employee of Marmora Freezing Corp., an affiliated company that operates on the same site as Fiera.

He started there as a minimum-wage temp in 2013, picking up his cash as I did at a payday lender, he says. After nine months or so, he was made permanent, was paid directly by the company, and received full health coverage. But he still describes the workplace as an accident waiting to happen.

“It’s really bad there,” he says. “I don’t even know the word to use.”

In his native Guyana, Byjoo took engineering courses and says he wasn’t afraid to call out his supervisors when he saw something unsafe. He also led a briefly successful drive at Marmora Freezing Corp. to form a union, but it was swiftly disbanded. Byjoo was terminated due to “corporate restructuring” earlier this year, he says.

He says he didn’t receive any training, relying instead on his own background knowledge. He describes telling his manager that forklift drivers should get certification and being advised that he should just have enough experience to avoid them.

“No product can be damaged when it goes out the door,” he says. But Byjoo feels what happens to workers is less of a concern.