On April 19, 2021, NELP testified in strong support of New York Laborers Local 79’s campaign to challenge labor broker practices that target New Yorkers under parole supervision (and other forms of court-related surveillance) for underpaid and dangerous work. These labor brokers are known in New York City as “body shops.” Local 79 is organizing to demand that New York City regulate and license body shops to stop the exploitation of formerly incarcerated and court-surveilled workers.
New York parole and other court-surveillance structures regularly require seeking and maintaining work as a condition of staying out of jail (along with daily curfews that limit access to work and a ban on participation in labor protests). NELP’s concern with body shops and other similarly unregulated labor brokers is that they combine and exacerbate 1. the criminal legal system’s targeting of Black and Latinx New Yorkers under bloated systems of punishment and surveillance, and 2. labor brokers’ sorting of Black and Latinx workers into second-tier temporary, lower-wage, unsafe work without benefits.