The Permatemps Contretemps

Courtney, 29, knows firsthand how logical it is to try to make your work better, rather than bailing out -- and how frustrating it can be to try to effect change as a temp. In 1998, having worked at Microsoft for almost two years, Courtney was still classified as a temp. His hourly wage had improved only slightly over those two years, the benefits were less than generous, and he was frustrated with his failed attempts to land a full-time job. He found a similarly disillusioned, long-term temp worker in Mike Blain. Besides their frustration, both men shared a passion for organizing. "High-tech temp workers had no effective representation at Microsoft, let alone at a state or a national level," says Blain, 33. "At the time, Microsoft was a member of an industry group that was trying to make overtime pay for hourly software workers optional, and staffing agencies were bending the ears of government officials in Washington's statehouse. But temps had no one speaking for them." While Microsoft did not lobby for the industry group's position, the group's effort still served as a wake-up call for what might happen if no one was representing the voice of the temps.

So the pair, along with 25 other high-tech workers, launched the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech). Blain and Courtney quit their temp jobs eight months later, after they got the financial backing of the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Microsoft had never been a target of high-tech union activity before. Blain and Courtney planned to change that through their work at WashTech. They also saw themselves as part of something larger: the first attempt to organize and represent the interests of workers who don't want to be employees of any one company, or who are contract workers unable to secure a full-time position.

If permatemps is an oxymoronic job description, then Blain and Courtney sought to create an oxymoronic labor union -- a union of people who, by definition, are temps. But who would want to join a group like that? Blain and Courtney didn't start out with all of the answers, but they did know that, given the level of dissatisfaction among Microsoft's temps, they had a fertile testing ground for their new union. Setting union dues at $11 per month, they went to work to demonstrate the value of membership and focused immediately on training, an opportunity that the two organizers recognized from their own experience as a missing element for most temps. The offer struck a nerve, and members began to sign up.

Still, like any union, WashTech needed specific grievances to rally around in order to gain visibility and to alert potential members that it was attempting to make Microsoft executives take it seriously. For years, temporary workers at Microsoft had not been able to request formal performance reviews directly from their managers at the company. Instead, Microsoft told temps to get their reviews from their employer of record: the temp agencies. "Your agency rep would send an evaluation form to your manager at Microsoft," Courtney says. "The manager would fill out the form and send it back to your agency, and then your rep would call you on the phone and read the manager's comments to you. Most agency reps were just regurgitating what the manager had written on the form."

But WashTech was aware of another review process that the temps were not privy to. "We'd known for several years that there was some sort of database that secretly tracked the performance of each temp worker," says Blain. "Someone stumbled onto it on the Microsoft corporate network and discovered that the company had been evaluating its temps and storing comments about them all along. So we quietly got the word out to people so that they could peek in and review their records. We knew that once Microsoft found out that we had discovered its database, the company would shut it down."

Microsoft did, in fact, cut off access to the database -- around the same time that WashTech went public with the news on its own Web site. "Because WashTech is around, people who missed the chance to see their file felt like it was safe to demand that Microsoft give them access to it," Courtney says. "Microsoft tells people that only their agency can make that evaluation, but then it keeps secret files that blackball some of them from ever working at the company again. When people can't get a straight answer about their performance, it really devalues their contribution as a worker."

For its part, Microsoft claims that WashTech encouraged temps to break the law by trespassing on the Microsoft network in search of those personnel files. Earlier this year, WashTech asked the state Department of Labor and Industries to issue an opinion about whether the temps have a right to see the files, and the state issued an opinion in favor of the temps.