Undercover in a Toronto factory where a temp worker died

Ignoring all the other things mentioned in comments, just assuming the simple case where Company B fully hires the employees. It's still an "advantage" for the bosses, because if things go wrong you can close Company B without much impact on the business of Company A. They just create Company C and continue.

As much as I hate all of this bullshit, it makes me happy that I refuse to let myself be abused like this.

The number of recruiters I have contact me for temp and contract-to-hire positions is insane! Even when I was unemployed a year ago, I told every single one of them the same thing. Temp and contract-to-hire is immoral and I am not interested in working for a company that sets their bar so low.

Sometimes I would feel a little too "holier-than-thou" saying that to a recruiter, but then I read stories like this and am glad I have at least some principals.

> what other ways do we have of increasing the bargaining position of labor?

You tighten the labor market.

It's not coincidental that unions, which depend on a tight labor market for a bargaining position (striking is fundamentally their real weapon), have been on a downhill trend since basically the same time that trade laws were changed to favor capital, via removing barriers to both foreign labor and foreign trade. In some cases the labor supply is slackened by bringing in more workers, in some cases by just offshoring production to a place where the labor market is already slack.

Most of the reasons used to justify this were related to the West's perceived existential struggle against Communism: it was necessary to open the door to China trade because that was a wedge against the Soviets; NAFTA was necessary to secure America's standing "as world champion of the free-market cause" ([per the NYT](http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/09/business/worldbusiness/09i...) as a hedge against an increasingly multipolar world in the 1990s; continued rounds of deals, up until very recently with the failure of the TPP, have always been justified similarly.

Though I am not intimately familiar with Canadian politics historically, I assume that the justifications there were similar (and with significant arm-twisting from their southern neighbor).

Intriguingly, the necessary sacrifices for American leadership (let's not call it 'hegemony', it has such an ... imperialist ring to it), in the form of the cost of economic subsidies to Western allies necessary to keep them toeing the free market line, have always seemed to fall on American -- and Canadian, apparently -- workers, and benefited American businesses and business owners. Workers are constantly reassured that these deals have been good for the country, but this explanation is starting to wear thin, as it becomes more and more apparent that the gains have gone to a small portion of the country at the expense of a great many.

Free-trade proponents have managed to extract a great deal from labor, but the gig is seemingly up.

Pro-trade, pro-business parties such as the British Columbia Liberal Party should take note of the current state of the US Republican Party, and take steps not to overplay their hand. While the gains made by businesses and capital owners at the expense of industrial workers are historically audacious (in the sense that they didn't result in getting anyone killed by an angry mob, which should be ),

Corporations have both positives and negatives, yet somehow there's never a debate over whether we should have those.

It's very strange to me that employees organizing and working together is so controversial, but management doing the same thing is not only expected but we can't even envision anything else.

Read up on the concept of "moral hazard." These temp companies are small entities, often run out of homes. If you go after them, they'll simply liquidate and fold up shop. Small entities have an advantage in highly regulated environments, because the most they can lose is 100% of their assets, while they stand to gain many multiples of that. Incorporation laws prevent owners from being liable for the debts of the corporation, in most cases, so in the event of a failure, the owners dust themselves off and move on to the next.

Large corporations love to outsource risky/dangerous/questionable activities to small firms who are willing to gamble.