Staffing agencies supply illegal immigrant workers to the Memphis distribution industry

This article is part of an occasional series examining the impact of immigration on Memphis and the Mid-South

Williams-Sonoma, a high-end retailer of everything from candlesticks to mahogany dining tables, produced $3.7 billion in sales last year. Christina Arce, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, says she helped generate some of that revenue.

For years, Arce says, her life revolved around her job at one of Memphis' huge warehouses -- sewing monograms onto backpacks, sheets, pillowcases and other goods for Williams-Sonoma.

Most workers in the monogram department, Arce asserts, were Hispanic immigrants sent by a staffing agency -- just like she was.

"Fortunately for them," Arce said, "we're the workforce that's bringing Williams forward."

Battalions of immigrants from Mexico and central America are an unseen force at the bottom rungs of the Memphis area's most important industry, distribution. They're participating in a sector that's booming as increased international trade has led big corporations to set up mega-warehouses here to distribute goods nationwide.

In recent years, the demand for labor to feed the gargantuan appetites of the American consumer has led many companies to use immigrants hired through staffing agencies. No hard numbers exist, but there are likely thousands. Many are here legally, but many lack legal status, which raises questions about exploitation and competition with unskilled Americans.

When San Francisco-based Williams-Sonoma announced, in 1983, that it planned to place distribution operations in the city, it was a major coup for local leaders trying to transform Memphis into a global logistics hub. Williams-Sonoma now occupies 4.8 million square feet at several facilities in Olive Branch and Memphis that supply retail stores and fulfill catalog orders for brands like Pottery Barn.

The firm needs workers for time-sensitive tasks like monograms and packaging, and it relies heavily on temporary workers to manage seasonal demand.

Williams-Sonoma declined repeated interview requests but released a short statement.

"We value our workforce and, to maintain our success and reputation, we take every measure possible to ensure our compliance with laws and regulations regarding hiring and all other aspects of our business," it reads in part. The firm uses audits to ensure the legality and fairness of its hiring practices and those of the companies that serve it.

Arce said her temporary assignment lasted for years. Now 36, she grew up in Jilotepec in central Mexico as one of eight children and said she struggled economically despite professional training as a nurse and a secretary. One of her last jobs in Mexico was sewing together shirts six days a week for 350 pesos, or roughly $35.

Then she met a smuggler "who told me that there was work, that here the construction workers make a lot of money, that they have a car in the garage. That they have a house," she said in Spanish. "You think 'Wow! Then I'm going!'"

Arce is dark-eyed and round-faced and wore carefully applied lipstick in recent interviews.

She said a group of 13 -- 11 men, two women -- spent a week walking at night to cross the border. A car took her to Memphis, where the smuggler placed her in an apartment with other immigrants. She said she arrived in April 2000 and paid a $1,500 fee over time.

"The first impression is that you're scared," she said. "Because you don't know how to -- well, it's as if you've arrived on another planet."

Her ticket to the American economy cost $120 -- the cost of a manufactured ID card and a document with an invented Social Security number.

Without access to transportation -- and unable to speak English -- she walked in search of work. Despite her illegal immigration status and forged paperwork, she had a good chance of finding it.

Although hiring illegal immigrants has been against the law since 1986, it is hard to enforce because authorities must show that employers are "knowingly" hiring illegal immigrants.

Employers must ask workers for documents showing they can work legally, but they don't have to confirm that the documents are real. In many cases, employers who hire illegal immigrants aren't breaking the law.

Arce's fake documents and another immigrant's help quickly led to a $6.50 per hour job as a kitchen aide in a restaurant.

She says she also worked for a time in a pillow factory before turning to a staffing agency.

These temporary agencies -- there were 135 active in Memphis in 2005 -- are an economic lifeline for new immigrants, and many agencies recruit Hispanic workers by advertising in Spanish-language media, with bilingual recruiters and by training and supervising in Spanish.

Social scientists at the University of Memphis, in articles published between 2003 and 2006, concluded that many local staffing agencies accepted low-quality fake identification.

Marcela Mendoza, an Argentinian anthropologist, negotiated inside access to warehouses and temporary agencies, and she and other researchers confirmed that many immigrant workers were here illegally.

Although no reliable data exist on total numbers of Hispanic workers in Memphis warehouses, federal data from 2006 found that one in four warehouse workers in the U.S. was Hispanic.

The researchers said that FedEx Corp., the city's largest employer, paid good wages and benefits, and found no evidence that the firm was hiring illegal immigrants. The Commercial Appeal's inquiry reached the same result.

But Memphis' big warehouses are located here because of FedEx, and many have long used temporary agencies to manage surges in volume.

Researchers also said using temps lets the companies avoid responsibility for hiring illegal immigrants, whose motivation to work and vulnerable status made them ideal for industry based on the unpredictable rhythms of global trade.

According to a 2005 article: "Lacking fringe benefits such as health insurance and pensions, as well as ... sick leave and paid vacations, Latino immigrants may be hired briefly, cheaply and flexibly."

Arce's path to the warehouse sector went initially through the Manpower staffing agency.

Manpower declined comment, but Arce said the firm sent her to Williams-Sonoma. But after three months, her bad Social Security number was found.

Every year, the Social Security Administration sends "no match" letters to employers and employees explaining problems with specific Social Security numbers. The letters can result from clerical errors but often are related to fake documents.

For years, employers didn't have explicit instructions on what to do. But this summer, the Bush administration issued new rules requiring employers to fire workers who cannot clarify discrepancies within three months. But a coalition that included labor unions and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed suit, and a federal judge earlier this month put an indefinite hold on implementation of the new rules, saying they would harm innocent workers and employers.

It wasn't long before Arce returned to Williams-Sonoma -- this time, she said, by using the same fake number to sign up with locally owned ASAP Staffing Services.

Arce and other immigrants say staffing agencies know that applicants use fake identification to obtain jobs.

Christina Arce said coming to Memphis from rural Mexico was like arriving on another planet, but she said she found warehouse work and other jobs despite her illegal immigration status and lack of English. "They know going in that you're mojado ('wet'), as they say -- to put it in an ugly way. But even knowing that, they hire us. ... Although they treat us badly ... we have to put up with it."

"They know going in that you're mojado, as they say -- to put it in an ugly way," she said, using a Mexican slang term, "wet," for illegal immigrants. "But even knowing that, they hire us. For that reason I also think that it's a very low salary."

Arce says the company is exploiting illegal immigrants by reducing the starting wage from $9 per hour for all monogram positions to $7 and $8 for some new workers. The conditions led American-born workers to leave, and immigrants became a bigger part of the workforce, she said.

"Although they treat us badly, we continue there because we have to put up with it," she said.

Bob Phillips, vice president and general manager of ASAP Staffing Services, strongly denied that ASAP knowingly hires illegal immigrants. He said the firm runs background checks, turns away those with fake documents and fires employees it discovers used false papers.

Last month the agency started using the government's E-Verify system to confirm Social Security numbers, he said.

Phillips wouldn't confirm that any given employee had worked for his company or that ASAP has a contract with Williams-Sonoma. It was unclear precisely when Arce started working for the firm. However, Arce has an ASAP award certificate given to her in April 2006 for perfect attendance, and others confirmed parts of her story.

Two illegal immigrants, including one who works in the firm's monogram division, said they used fake documents to obtain jobs at Williams-Sonoma through ASAP.

Christopher Perez, 26, a legal immigrant from Mexico who formerly worked for ASAP in Williams-Sonoma's monogram division, said most of the machine operators are Hispanic but that he never asked about their legal status.

According to Cesar Yzaguirre, 46, a naturalized citizen from Peru who said he works for ASAP at Williams-Sonoma, the firm's labor force is overwhelmingly Hispanic. "Williams-Sonoma, they have like 20 percent people from here," he said. "Eighty percent, immigrants."

Like Arce, he said his pay has remained at $9 for the nearly two years that he has worked there. He said new workers are starting at $7.50 and said some of the temp workers at Williams-Sonoma have discussed their illegal status with him.

Some immigrants are unwilling to complain about working conditions. Arce, however, says she did just that, and it led to her eventual departure.

Arce said she had been responsible for operating sewing machines that automatically stitched personalized monograms onto Williams-Sonoma products. On most days she rose at 3 a.m. to arrive for the start of her 4 a.m. shift.

She said her problems started last year when a new manager demanded increased production. She complained to managers, in broken English, that she wasn't paid for the extra work.

She said this angered them and that in June, she was demoted to a position as a "clipper" who cleans up the monograms.

Phillips wouldn't comment on specifics, but insists ASAP pays employees well and has few worker complaints.

"I walk away from business where customers don't value the employee," he said. "If the employee is just a body to them, I don't want to be part of that customer's equation for staffing."

Williams-Sonoma is the largest company-owned distribution operator in the Memphis area, according to statistics compiled by the Memphis Business Journal. The second largest is Technicolor Home Entertainment Services, a division of French media conglomerate Thomson, whose Memphis operations distribute millions of CDs and DVDs for media giants like Disney, Paramount and Universal.

Technicolor operates a total of 3.9 million square feet in eight facilities in the Memphis area. It has roughly 2,600 permanent employees and is offering signing bonuses in its efforts to attract 200 more. During busy times, the firm can hire more than 3,000 temps.

Applicants fill out forms at a Select Staffing office in East Memphis. Representatives say the firm checks carefully to ensure that applicants have the right to work in the United States.

At 4:38 a.m. on a Friday morning in August, a blinking white strobe light helped temps find their way through the predawn darkness to a small door in the side of Technicolor's Memphis Oaks facility on Holmes Road.

Over the next hour, more than 100 people, most of them Hispanic immigrants, filled a cafeteria. They arrive long before the scheduled 6 a.m. start of the shift because they know sometimes only a few will receive jobs, which start at $7 per hour.

In essence, it's a day labor market. But it's one that a staffing agency manages for a multinational firm that last year showed revenues of 5.9 billion Euros, or $7.4 billion.

A similar scene regularly plays just down the road, where workers in blue shirts wait outside another Technicolor facility that distributes Microsoft products including X-Box games and antivirus software.

Technicolor's operations are an extreme example of a larger trend. Warehouse companies rarely need the same number of workers year-round. Technicolor, which is subject both to the busy holiday season and unexpected orders from studios, recalculates each day how many workers it will need for its 24-hour operations. Sometimes it guesses wrong and sends workers home.

Select Staffing of Santa Barbara, Calif., provides workers to the Memphis Oaks facility, and Staff Line, a Memphis-based firm, supplies workers to the Microsoft facility.

Representatives of Technicolor and the staffing agencies involved recognize how waits frustrate workers but say they're necessary for security.

Select calls more workers than it needs because many don't show up, said Mary H. Collier, vice president of human resources for Technicolor Home Entertainment Services.

Melissa Porter, Select's executive vice president, said workers are rarely turned away.

Rod Rodriguez, Staff Line's executive director, said workers standing in line outside the Microsoft facility have been assigned to work and aren't competing for jobs, though he said unexpected events sometimes mean Technicolor needs fewer workers than planned.

Select and Staff Line said they give rejected workers two hours of "show-up" pay, and that not all temps must wait in line.

Legal status is an issue at Technicolor. The Commercial Appeal interviewed four Mexicans who said they used fake IDs to get jobs at Technicolor through staffing agencies.

The staffing firms say they go further than immigration law requires and run background checks. Still, some unauthorized workers get through.

"I believe that's probably possible," Collier said. "I think most people understand that in today's world that obtaining false documentation that looks very valid oftentimes happens. It's beyond our control."

On the morning of Aug. 2, one of the people sent home without work from Technicolor's Memphis Oaks facility was Nekita Green, an African-American.

"They put the Latinos in front of us, you know what I'm saying?" she said. "We can come here earlier. They tell us to be here at 5. We come at 5, they still don't pick us."

Illegal immigrants and their defenders often say that they are doing jobs Americans don't want, but that doesn't always reflect the reality of Memphis, where logistics work is mainstream. An estimated 61,000 people in Crittenden, DeSoto and Shelby counties worked last year in fields related to transportation and warehouses.

Warehouse jobs are traditionally the realm of the black working class, and tensions between black and Hispanic workers are so strong that some warehouse companies have set up separate areas for the groups, according to the U of M researchers.

A Commercial Appeal reporter saw a group of young black warehouse workers taunting Hispanic workers outside a staffing agency. And Arce and other immigrants expressed prejudice against black workers, saying Hispanics work harder.

For Green, a mother of five who has dyed red hair and a ready smile, occasional warehouse jobs were part of her efforts to leave behind her former life as a dancer in Memphis' notorious strip clubs. Yet, she estimated out of her 15 attempts to find work at Technicolor, she was brought inside just once.

"We go out there for that opportunity and they slam the door in our face," she said. "That's rejection. So how else are we going to get money?"

Experts continue to debate the effect of immigration on low-skilled workers. Given the lack of solid data about immigrants in the local warehouse sector, it's difficult to determine if they are driving out native-born workers.

Since leaving Williams-Sonoma, Arce has taken a similar path. She now runs a small business selling health and beauty products with her husband, another Mexican warehouse worker. They have no children and earn enough to send money to relatives in Mexico.

In an interview this summer, Arce said she was still adjusting to a life that didn't involve waking up before dawn.

First, wages were going down because illegals were feeding the sector, forcing out others because they could and would subject themselves to poorer working conditions.

Second, this is the primary reason why minimum wage legislation /doesn’t/ work. Even with reduced wages, no one was being paid minimum wage, but that floor was there, an excuse for people to say ‘hey, you’re making two bucks more than minimum wage, stop your complaining...’

And finally, whah-whah-whah. Illegal aliens made an illegal alien lose her job. There’s plenty of Americans who would like that job, which could be done on modernized equipment, more efficiently, were it not for the continued stream of illegal aliens making a new low spot on the employment totem pole.

It is time to come up with a solution. This issue will destroy this Country. I'm all for Illegals being kicked out but it ain't gonna happen. Can everyone please try to figure out who is here and how we get that information.

I know I will get flamed on this but I'm a realist and this has to be dealt with now.

Actually there is. Basic Pilot is a federal system set up for employers to check, voluntarily, but most don’t use it. It could be made mandatory, but won’t.

Had the company been hiring the illegals directly, they would probably have been receiving hundreds of no-match letters every year from the SSA, which probably would have gone ignored. At the very least, the Agency who they work for would have been receiving them and so must have known they were hiring illegals.

Unfortunately, Bush’s plan to enforce penalties against companies that ignore no-match letters was a farce. SSA was never going to be obligated to share the employer information with DHS, making enforcement impossible. Bush admitted to knowing that, yet sues to get his plan to go forward rather than fixing the real problem.

Can everyone please try to figure out who is here and how we get that information.

Until you can shut the supply off, it is meaningless to try to figure out who is here. If you have a water pipe break in the basement, the first thing you do is to shut the water off and then figure out how to deal with the flooded basement and water damage. We need to secure our borders, including a workable system to track down and deport visa overstays. And we must enforce our laws against employers who hire illegals.

Hopefully, many of the illegals will go home. I see no sense of urgency in dealing with those already here. There are ways to collect information on illegals if we can overcome the objections of the Dems and ethnic groups who have continually blocked such efforts. We can use the school systems, law enforcement, hospitals, and government welfare agencies to collect this information so we can make good public policy. The bottom line is that we need to shut off the supply first and then worry later about how to deal with those already here.

Dealing with the ones here is one way to slow down the entry. I have lived in several countries and know that their enforcement didn’t end at the border. Their SS system, their school system, their postal system, driver’s license etc were all means of enforcement. No passport and work permit..or resident permit..and you were in hot water.
We instead have created a system where only citizens most provide legal ID..the rest are routinely ignored.
We are a country of laws and the laws need to be enforced.

Yep - deportation of 20+ Million illegals might be impractical - but shut off the jobs and all benefits to them and they have no reason to stay. The bulk of them would go home on their own - leaving a small enough number that deportation then becomes feasible.

Well, I do know this has been happening for quite a while, since when I work previously out in Lakeland, I had an employee who tried the Williams-Sonoma lottery, and she didn't get through. (of course, she quit instead of resigning, so I wouldn't hire her back either. Oh well....)

She complained that they would pay her $7/hr, and then wouldn't keep her past 2 weeks.

Maybe that's why I don't purchase anything from them - overpriced and inefficient.

No, you won’t be flamed by this FReeper.

Just look at what’s happening in some states already. They are enacting ordinances and enforcing the laws that the Federal Government won’t enforce.

The result is migration, by the thousands, out of the town, the state and/or the country.

If migration is mainly internal, i.e., to another sanctuary state or city, the sheer numbers of illegals overwhelming hospitals, schools, etc. will force the bleeding heart liberals to revolt and invoke the famous “NIMBY”, Not In My BackYard.

Eventually the immigration back to home countries or perhaps to Canada will occur

I know what you are saying. Here in TN they enacted an ID law for all alcohol purchases (that leave the premises) for everyone regardless of perception of age. I've seen 60 year old Mexicans try to buy beer and they can't. They leave the state. (It's a shame to treat mature adults like children but hey, get a green card).

The de-magnetizing is working here. :^)

Remind me; if I ever buy a shirt from this company, I should pay in fake money, made up from invented social security numbers. What the employer is doing may not be considered a crime, but the behavior is criminal. Eventually the management will have to answer to a higher authority.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.