Returning citizens are being funneled into exploitative temp jobs that pay poverty wages, deny them basic labor protections, and deepen the state’s control over their lives long after they’ve served their time. This week, Mansa Musa speaks with Katherine Passley and Maya Ragsdale, co-execu tive directors of Beyond the Bars, about how Florida’s temp industry traps the most vulnerable workers and operates as a profitable and punishing extension of the prison system.Guests: Maya Ragsdale is the founder and co-executive director of Beyond the Bars, a worker center in South Florida building the social and economic power of workers with criminal records and their families. Katherine Passley is co-executive director of Beyond the Bars. Passley was named the 2025 Labor Organizer of the Year by In These Times magazine. Additional links/info: Beyond the Bars website, Substack, and Instagram Beyond the Bars, The Temp Trap Report Credits: Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated. Mansa Musa: Returning citizens are routinely pushed out of permanent jobs and instead pushed into temporary work often for the same role. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 27% of formerly incarcerated individuals are unemployed, a rate higher than the Great Depression. Temp agencies often circumvent anti-discrimination laws and workforce protections, fueling exploitation and instability for vulnerable workers. A new report, The Temp Trap by Beyond the Bar’s co-director Maya Ragsdale and Katherine Passley argues that the state supervision and workforce discrimination keeps returning citizens trapped. The authors say it’s as if returning citizens are still doing time. Maya and Katherine joins us today to discuss their finding from two years of research. Welcome to Rattling the Bars. Speaker 2: Thanks. Delighted to be here. Mansa Musa: Okay, thank you. Thank you. So let’s start by just introducing yourselves to our audience, and then we’ll go ahead and start unpacking this report that y’all did. We’ll start with you, Katherine. Speaker 2: Yeah. So I’m Katherine. I’m excited to be here again. I’m the co-executive director at Beyond the Bars with Maya, and I am over the organizing department at Beyond the Bars, so in charge of all of the fieldwork and managing the organizers that hit the field every day. Speaker 3: Okay. And I’m Maya Ragsdale. As Kat said, I’m the co-director of Beyond the Bars with her. And I do a lot of our policy and research work, helping take the fieldwork that Kat and the organizing team are leading in the field and putting them into policy proposals, research documents, those sorts of things. Mansa Musa: Y’all wrote this report called The Temp Trap. So for the benefit of our audience, can you explain how the temporary industry operates, how widespread it is, and describe the relationship between the workers, temp agencies, and the host employees? Speaker 3: I think a lot of times when people hear about temp agencies, they think about the types of temp agencies that you might see on TV, where you have somebody that’s usually a younger white woman who’s working in a office for somebody. That’s a very, very specific type of temp agency. What we really see for people when they’re coming home is a totally different part of the temp industry. So essentially, the temp industry is this massive sort of industry that spans every single sector of the economy. You see it in office places, you see it in manufacturing facilities, factories, you see it in warehouses, you see it in construction sites, you see it in even biotech companies, legal companies. You see it every single place in the economy. The way that temp agencies essentially work is that they are taking on the role of payroll. So they basically are where workers will get their paycheck from, where workers are supposed to, if they’re injured on the job, get workers’ comp protection, if they get laid off, get unemployment protection. So temp agencies essentially act as the employer of record for the host employer, which is the company that they’re actually working for. So the way that that actually looks in practice is that a worker is going to go to a shop basically like a storefront, Sign up, put their name down, maybe do a resume, maybe do an interview, not always. And then within either the same day or within a week, they’re often placed at another company, which is what is called the host employer. And the reason why host employers do this, the reason why companies do this is because it lets them outsource risk. They don’t have to worry about being sued in the same way they would if they actually hired the worker directly. They can really cut down on their labor costs. And the way that they do that, they don’t have to pay benefits. They don’t have to worry about paying for workers’ comp. They don’t have to worry about unemployment insurance. And it just drives the wages lower in general. And so the way that that looks is that a host employer pays the temp agency per head per worker. So they have a contract with the temp agency saying, “Every single person that you send us, we’re going to pay you $20 an hour for. ” The temp agency essentially pays the worker usually minimum wage and then they capture that profit in between. So the whole way that the temp agency works is by every dollar that they pay the worker more is a dollar out of their pockets. Literally all they’re doing is supplying labor.That’s their role, that’s how they make their profit. Mansa Musa: How significant is the Florida temp industry within the state labor market and does it fuel the economy? So we going to juxtapose this when we say like, “Okay, we recognize what the temp agency is, but now to look at the relationship between that, the agency and the prison industrial complex, the utilization of returning citizens in this mechanism.” Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s a great question. There’s about 900,000 people in Florida, which is about 4% of the state’s population that are doing temp work on a yearly basis. It’s about $10 billion in payroll in Florida, and it’s about $140 billion in the country. And I think within that, what’s really important is that the blue collar staffing, which is where people with records are mostly going, so that’s supplying workers to construction sites, to warehouses, to factories. That part of the temp industry is really, really big. It’s about a third of the total profits. Mansa Musa: With this context in mind, we now turn to Catherine Passley, a recently honored 2025 labor organizers year by In these Times Magazine, who shares a firsthand experience using salting to undercover the realities faced by temp agency workers. Salting refers to the strategic practice of union supporters seeking employment in non-union workplaces to build solidarity and support from within. The ultimate goal, organizing and union. Speaker 2: So the program in the field, our organizers are actively salting, but not just the organizers, but the members themselves who have, prior to salting, our workers with records that make ends meet through temp agencies, I myself did a salting shift. And I arrived at a warehouse as a temp worker for a 12-hour shift. I wasn’t provided any training, but they demanded of me the same kind of work for way less pay than any of the direct hires. And we do a lot more of the grunt work. So the direct hires would do the minimum to function in the warehouse, but then everyone, all of the other temp workers that were there were the ones that are lugging the heavy boxes from one part of the warehouse to the other. We have members that have had to do construction work. And so when we talk about temp agencies, like Maya was saying, there’s a kind of a class within the temp agency that’s the lowest that you would hear our members and you’ll hear even in the Florida Labor Pool Act called it like the labor pool. And so these labor pools, you arrive to them at like four or five in the morning, you’re waiting there to try to get a ticket. That’s not guaranteed. And the moment you do get a ticket and you go to this particular host employee, you’re doing whatever it is that they tell you to do. And if you didn’t bring your own safety gear, it’s very rare that they provide you one. For the warehouse that I was working at, they said everyone needed to wear steel toed boots. I didn’t bring it that day. And they were just like, “Fine, just get on the floor.” And that’s just the reality for every worker with a record and every temp worker at the sites. Mansa Musa: Right. And y’all documented in the report, y’all documented a lot of the behaviors associated with the abuse that’s taking place in the temp agency. Y’all knocked on 1043 doors, y’all had conversation. Talk about that. Talk about y’all investigative method, tactics, to get this information, to have an evidentiary standard on how abusive this system is. Speaker 2: Yeah. Even figuring out about what the labor pools were, we had conversations, we kind of started with conversations with our members that were temp workers to try to figure out where are you going? And there was like, at least for me, there was this confusion of like, are they temp workers? Are they day laborers? Because they call it day labor because they showed up at a random Mansa Musa: Spot. Right. Speaker 2: Yeah. They showed up at a random spot, they got a job, they were put into a bus sometimes, or they were catching a ride from someone that was there to go to a site. And when I’d ask them, “Okay, what’s the name of the building where you were at? What’s the name of the agency?” And no one really knew. It was like a shady kind of place. And so that’s kind of where our journey began, doing day labor hunting essentially. And then finally we made it inside of the temp agencies that would be in this plaza, it would be unmarked, they’d have some QR codes on the outside to scan, to get in line, to give your information and you provide all of your logistical information. And then we realized, okay, this is actually not day labor in the sense that you think where you’re going outside of Home Depot to get, this is actually a way more formal and way more intricate system than the folks that are there just trying to get work are engaging in. And it’s all done for a reason, right? If you have a wage theft claim and you didn’t write down the name of the agency you worked at or where the host was or any of that information, you can’t really file the wage steps claim. It’s very, very difficult. And especially with temp agencies that are here today and gone tomorrow because it’s a very unstable, the profit margins are extremely thin. So throughout that journey, we started to also knock out doors around temp agencies to understand how ingrained they are in the community. And we found that many of the temp agencies are very deep in what we call the brown areas or the industrial areas within communities, especially black and brown communities within a mile of the jails and prisons. It was very clear that what their role was in the exploitation of black and brown communities, and especially workers with records. Speaker 3: And just one thing that’s so crazy, when you sign up to do temp work, they have you fill out this form, and that form is one where they can get tax credits for essentially hiring people with records. They are literally getting tax breaks because they’re supposed to be providing jobs within a year of a person’s release to help them get stable, right? So they say they’re doing this reentry work, helping people transition into stable employment, and then they’re getting all these tax breaks for it, despite the fact that that’s not at all what they’re doing. And often all you have to do to qualify for that tax credit, which is called the work opportunity tax credit, is do 120 hours of work. Once they do that, then they fire the person so that they can get a new tax credit Mansa Musa: From another person. And that’s where I wanted to go at point right here, because I wanted y’all to make the connection between the prison industrial complex and the temp agencies. Most of the people they exploiting, do these people have, like you just mentioned, records or they have obligation, you have to get a job that’s a condition of their parole or they’re on a work release program within the prison. What’s the relationship between the two, the temp agency and the prison industrial complex? Speaker 3: Yeah, I can talk about, so there’s a few ways that it relates. I think one thing is that obviously if you have a background, it makes it way harder to get a job. A background check is going to make it so that you can’t get most jobs. A temp agency doesn’t, often they don’t do background checks. And so it’s a way to just sidestep that requirement and then they’ll still send you to the exact same job that you could have otherwise done if they hadn’t done the background check. So for example, we have a member who applied for a job at a warehouse. They did a background check. He got denied. He went to a temp agency and he got a job working at the exact same warehouse for basically like $10 less an hour because the temp agency let them sidestep that requirement. So that’s one thing, which is just like the criminal record excludes you from the job, the temp agency lets you do the exact same job, but for less pay. And then I think the other side of that, so I was on probation for a couple of years and when I was on probation, there was all of these different kinds of requirements that they had for me. I had to do a certain number of community service hours. I had to do, I probably had $2,000, $3,000 worth of fees that I had to pay off. I had an employment mandate. If I didn’t work, then they could arrest me. I had a curfew for some period of that time, and that curfew was, I think if I can remember correctly, it was either 8:00 or 9:00 PM. So there were all of these different requirements that I had. And at the time, I was also taking care of somebody that was in prison. And so I was paying all of his commissary costs, all of the phone call costs. And so when you have all of those costs that are added up, plus the employment mandate from probation, temp jobs just become a thing that makes sense. It’s like where you can get quick money, not a lot of money, but it’s at least a paycheck and you don’t have to worry about all these other, the background checks and all of these other sort of things. So there’s also that part, which is like the probation system, the way the probation, parole, community control, there’s so many different forms of supervision that somebody can come home on, but all of these different things, they have so many different requirements that you have to comply with and it makes it so that the temp agency makes a lot of sense. And then on top of that, a lot of these temp agencies, they actually contract. They have contracts with probation. They show up at reentry job fairs. They are actively recruiting. We’ve heard from an organizer in North Carolina that they’re showing up outside of the jails and prisons trying to pick people up. We’ve heard about temp agencies in California that they have contracts with halfway houses and those halfway houses are sending people. It is mandatory to work for the temp agency. And so there’s ways that the temp agencies, not only are people pushed into temp agencies, just based on probation, based on background checks, based on all of these different sorts of things that exist, but on top of that, they are literally in contracts with some of these carceral institutions, I guess you could say, that are requiring people to work for the temp agencies. Mansa Musa: Catherine, what’s your experience from your organization perspective? Well, how many people that, to y’all knowledge, have been subjected to being returned back to prison because they failed to meet their employment obligation as a result of working for a temp agency that they was dissatisfied with and couldn’t continue to work under the dehumanizing conditions. Do y’all have anything in that area? Speaker 2: We have 36 members in our temp worker organizing committee, and at least half will tell you that at some point they have gone back in because either not being able to find work and not meet the employment mandate or just getting injured on the job and not being able to return. They’ll all tell you that they’ve faced that losing their housing because they weren’t able to get work and then that they ended up getting a technical violation because they weren’t able to make it to their probation hearing on time. Yeah, definitely more than half of them have experienced just higher recidivism because of it. And Speaker 3: I think we did a survey inside of the jails in Miami in 2024, sorry, 2023. And of the almost 200 people that we surveyed, I think it was a third of them, said that they had been threatened with jail time by their whatever type of supervision it was, whether it was probation or whatever, because they couldn’t meet their, just the basic fines and fees, obligations, which obviously were related to whether or not you have a job to pay them off. Mansa Musa: Right. Hey, Ken, you want to go to the clip? Speaker 4: Since I was 18 years old, I have been in and out of jail and being incarcerated for me, it was very crazy. It’s a place where no human belongs. Speaker 5: I’ve been incarcerated two times throughout my whole life. I was getting in trouble because I didn’t really care about stuff from losing two of my friends due to comm violence. Speaker 6: After I got released, I found it hard to kind of find jobs, menial jobs like McDonald’s, the Burger Kings, et cetera, et cetera. So I was told, “Oh, look, you can go to these labor agencies.” It’s been a couple of years now that I’ve been doing those kind of jobs and it hasn’t been easy. Speaker 7: The experience is, I say unpredictable because a lot of times you show up to these labor pools to get work and you don’t know whether you’re going to get a ticket or a job that day. And so you kind of just have to wait around. Sometimes there’s favoritism, sometimes there’s discrimination. Speaker 5: I made it there at 3:30 in the morning and I stayed there all the way until 11:30 AM. People came after me, 7:30, 8:30, maybe even nine o’clock and got tickets. I felt like I was getting discriminated. I felt like I was in a biased situation because I was the only person there my skin color. Speaker 4: I sat there for about five hours just without information. Next day that I came back, I received the ticket then. Speaker 8: I thought higher course would be like a career job, something that was for people who was incarcerated and were trying to find, like do better for yourself, people that wants to do better, but turns out it was just like selling you dreams. I’d be like, okay, you would come here and if you do a good job, and if you be a good worker and like bring people along, like this would be a career. You could work here every day, you could be a nine to five and it never was like that. Mansa Musa: This clip that we just show, kind of like put in perspective, the thinking behind the people that’s going into these spaces. And I think you touched on that a minute ago, Maria, when you say like it creates a sense of like desperation in one regard. I got to get a job. I’m trying to get a job. This word on the street is that this particular entity right here is a mechanism that’s providing the job opportunities. When I get there, I find myself waiting like a shift. I’m waiting eight hours, 12 hours, told to come back the next day. Unpack that for our audience, that experience. Speaker 2: Yeah. And I have gone with members and have seen and wait. The insidious thing about this system, which you kind of heard Jay and a few other folks talk about in that clip was that even though they’re trying to get these workers, they’re trying to get these credits, they’re also in the process of systemically pitting those people against each other. We’ve gone to agencies where if I’m Latino, if I speak Spanish, I’m going to get hired, but an Afro-American worker that doesn’t speak Spanish with a record won’t get hired and they’re very clear on why they’re doing that and why pit us against each other in that way. And so that’s one of the biggest experiences that you’ll hear our members talk about is just like this discrimination to make them feel less than. And then the Latino person that gets the job on the job is still being treated less than by those direct hires. And it’s just like really this kind of like vicious cycle. And then the second member that spoke there, Jay, when we were speaking with her, she talked about how this was generational for her. Her father was formerly incarcerated, so was her mother and they both were temp workers. She also ended up becoming a temp worker with a record. She’s like, everyone in her community also are either impacted and have gone to a temp site at some point in their lives. It impacts their entire communities. And it’s this thing that everyone that doesn’t have a record that doesn’t look like us are moving towards getting generational wealth, yet we’re really moving in this system of generational debt caused by systemic returning into these temp agencies into this system. Speaker 3: I think one thing that one of the people that were highlighted on that clip said is that you think, he said he thought that HireQuest was going to be a pathway to a good job and they market themselves that way. That’s what they say that they’re doing. You see it in all of their websites and all of their marketing materials, right? We create opportunities for people to find good work. We help people find careers. And when you come home, that’s what you want. People want to have good jobs. People want to be able to support themselves. People want to be able to support their families. These things really matter. And so these agencies are saying these things, that’s what they’re telling people that they’re doing. That’s how they’re saying, that’s how they’re getting these government credits. It’s all on this premise that they are pathways into good jobs. And we do not see that happening. We don’t see this leading into direct employment. And the reason why is because the agency is profiting from having temp workers. They don’t want to let go of those workers. They want to hold onto those workers. And so as a result, they do all kinds of crazy things inside of their contracts. They say that if somebody who comes and does really well at a temp agency, they want to get direct hired by the place that they’ve been working, that place has to pay them sometimes $6,000, $7,000 to hire that worker. Mansa Musa: Oh my goodness. Yeah, go ahead. Speaker 3: So they are actually blocking people from getting good jobs or blocking people from getting careers. So that’s one way they’ll do it. Sometimes they have non-compete clauses that say you can’t try to find work at another agency after you worked for us for a certain period of time. There’s all kinds of different ways that they do this. But I think it’s just there’s this myth that they are creating. There’s this myth that is fundamental to the way that they function and it’s just not what you see in practice at all. Mansa Musa: Let’s go through examine in its entirety because you have the temp agencies, you have people that’s like … I think y’all described it as the economy of state supervision. Talk about that, why y’all call it economy state supervisor, because I want our audience to understand that the premeditation of the temp agency is not based on them creating an equality situation for a job, but it’s basically a plantation … This is the new plantation where I got free labor, I got a set of conditions that guarantee I’m going to have labor. I got a set of conditions that guarantee that I’m going to be able to get monetized this label. Talk about that, what y’all call the economy of state supervision. Speaker 2: We talked about all of the restrictions people face, not just when you’re incarcerated, but even post-incarceration and just the hegemony that the carceral state has in your livelihood. And so it’s like you get out, you have to pay court fees. Those court fees go through the clerk of courts. In Florida, if you try to go to the clerk of courts, you want to vote and you’re trying to figure out how much you owe, may got be with you because they’ll be like, “We got to find your file.” They don’t know where … They trying to figure out what’s going on and you’re just trying to pay your stuff off so you can vote.That’s like one whole system. The other system is you got probation and so you got to pay probation off and they telling you you have to work, but you also, while you have to work, you’re nine to five, they want to do a pop-up visit at your job in full uniform. They want you to come drop at the probation office at random hours in the day, one, two, three, but you at work and you got to pay them back. Okay, that’s a whole other thing. You got kids. The state also wants to make sure you’re paying your child support, they’re garnishing your wages.That’s another kind of supervision. There’s a control that they have over the life of a worker with a record is why we call it the state of economic supervision because it’s like they’re monitoring you, they monitor every cent you bring in. And a lot of the workers will tell you after doing eight to 12 hours a day, they probably make like after taxes and everything, they bring back under $80 home. Out of those $80, you got to pay like 10 to probation, 20 to court, another … They’re left with … If they can get a meal and not even a good meal, that’s pretty much all they have left at the end of the day. Speaker 3: And that part that Kat’s talking about, about the supervision when you come home, I feel like it just mirrors what happens inside of prison because it’s like if you’re on work release, they’re garnishing 40% of your wages, then they’re taking out your child support payments. And at the end of the day, you might work a full-time job at minimum wage and then you get paid. So it’s literally like you work in prison or jail for no money, you go to work release, you get paid minimum wage supposedly. After all the garnishments, you basically get paid 10, $20 at the end of the week, come home, you do temp work. Same things happen because of all of those different ways that they’re taking fees out. So it’s just like, it keeps happening at every single level, every single sort of step in that process. Mansa Musa: And we say you pay your debt to society, this is literally paying your debt to society. It’s like, no, this is not figuratively speaking, this is an application that I’m paying society after I serve my time or while I’ve served my time. But y’all also talk about, in terms of like, y’all identify the problem, but y’all also got solutions to the problem. And let’s talk about Y’all solution, the economic freedom agenda. Talk about the economic freedom agenda. Speaker 2: The history behind the economic freedom agenda is not an idea that came out of nowhere. It comes, it stems out of the economic freedom budget by A. Philip Randolph in the coalition he had with Martin Luther King. And so it’s faith-based organizations and labor at that time that were taking interest in criminal justice to also level the playing field and bring workers to the forefront. And so the economic freedom of agenda that we’re proposing as a solution kind of mirrors that except for that we’re directly as an organization that really focuses on workers with records and criminal justice, bringing in criminal justice and labor to the table together to do two things. One, to raise the standards in the temp industry, and two, to create a pathways for workers with records to union jobs and to unionize. And so the increasing standards of attempt agencies has a few different levels of things in it and same with unionization. So those breakdowns, I’m going to pass it on over to my colleague, Maya, to bring us home. Mansa Musa: Yeah. Come on, bring us home. Speaker 3: I mean, in terms of the union side of things, I think unions are so important. They are the only large scale, dues funded, progressive membership in the country. They control, they have 16 million members. They control like $7 trillion in pension funds. They have $2.5 billion in unspent money at the end of every year. So they have so much, so many resources and so much power in a way that none of our other organizations in the progressive sort of side of things do. And so we really think that unions should be investing in putting their money in workers with records, developing the leadership of workers with records at every single step of their process, from recruiting people into the unions through apprenticeship programs, pre-apprenticeship programs, all the way through leadership development, bringing people up in their ranks into leadership positions within those unions. And then when they have membership that is unions providing real reentry benefits, making sure that they’re actually tailoring their benefits to people who have records. So that’s a huge thing for us. We think that that is so important to have unions that are actually doing real reentry work because they are the ones, they are actually job creators. They’re the ones that are negotiating for better wages, better conditions in a way that none of our other organizations really can. Mansa Musa: Is this not inelible rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Exactly. Kat, is there anything that you want to add that we did not cover as we close out? And I’ll come back to you, Maya. Speaker 2: Yeah. I think that there’s just one thing that I want to diswell because I hear it a lot about when we talk about unions and it’s like, yes, we need these bigger unions with these coffers to really invest in their members, especially members with records within their already collective bargaining and thinking about expanding to include more workers with records, but also we are in a place where new organizing can happen. Unions are not just the name unions that we know. Unions are the workers and the workers that have the ability to unionize and can make it happen. And so we want to make sure that we’re always lifting up, that we’re developing worker committees, not just weird. Worker committees are happening where the workers themselves are like, “We want to fight for better conditions at our job and are doing the wall-to-wall organizing.” And it’s just that is what’s to me really worth fighting for is the workers themselves that are like, “We want the pathway to unionize.” Whether the name unions want to come along, we’re rooting for them to do that or not. ...read more read less