On a brilliant day three years ago, a grieving crowd gathered on the South Side of Chicago to bury Adewale Ezekiel Ogunyemi.
In Nigeria, Ogunyemi had not earned enough working in a bank to support his mother, wife and two daughters. So in 2019, he flew to the United States on a tourist visa and obtained fake identity documents. He then signed on for temporary work at several staffing agencies in the Chicago area.
Shy and laid-back, he was often assigned to do night jobs. One agency, Snider-Blake Personnel, sent him to scrub machines at Rich Products Corp., which makes food products that have been sold at stores like Walmart and distributed by suppliers like Sysco.
One night in July 2021, workers at Rich heard a scream. Rushing to an area of the plant where the dough for frozen pizzas rises, they found Ogunyemi, who was 42, tangled in a machine that helps the dough ferment. His right arm had been pulled through the conveyor and wrapped around his head. His chest was crushed. The fire department had to free him from the machine, and he was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Staffing agencies, like the ones Ogunyemi worked for, have become ubiquitous in America’s on-demand economy. Companies turn to the firms to find workers for factories, warehouses and distribution centers, where jobs are often difficult to fill.
The workers, The New York Times reported recently, include people who are in the country illegally, are desperate for jobs and are vulnerable to exploitation. With staffing agencies acting as middlemen, companies can sidestep responsibility for the hiring and treatment of these workers, even as they profit from their labor.
While relevant data is limited and generally does not specify immigration status, research in multiple states shows that temporary workers have faced higher rates of serious injuries than their permanently hired counterparts.
One recent study in Washington state, which mirrored findings in Illinois and Ohio, found that the injury rate among temporary workers there, adjusted for the distribution of workers across industries, was about 67% higher, according to an analysis by Michael Foley, an occupational health research economist at the state’s Department of Labor and Industries.
To more fully understand the hazardous conditions in some of these workplaces, reporters reviewed thousands of pages of regulatory documents, lawsuits, police reports and internal company records, and interviewed researchers, staffing industry veterans and labor advocates, as well as more than 100 temporary workers, most of whom entered or remained in the United States illegally.
The investigation found that many people employed by the staffing industry, including workers in the U.S. without legal permission, have been placed in dangerous situations where they suffered serious physical harms — fractures, amputations, miscarriages — or death. When it comes to redress, the Times found, it has been hard for some workers or their families to hold the manufacturers to account because the staffing agency, as their actual employer, acted as a legal shield.
A review of federal workplace safety records by the Times found that at least 50 workplace deaths since 2017 involved staffing agencies. The Times also identified a sampling of more than 1,000 severe injuries to people working for staffing agencies from 2015 to 2023, including more than 250 amputations, 370 broken bones and 30 instances of crushed body parts.
More than 50 of the severe injuries occurred in Illinois, where the so-called collar counties that surround Chicago are crowded with food processing and other factories. Six of the country’s largest freight railway lines converge in the region, with each earning more than $1 billion a year hauling goods and commodities.
Illinois also has been at the forefront of national efforts to regulate staffing agencies. It is one of the few states where companies can be fined for using unregistered agencies, and a state law allows worker centers and others to file complaints on behalf of temporary workers, who might otherwise not have the wherewithal to do so.
Federal, state and local regulators have pursued at least 25 investigations of staffing agencies operating in Illinois for potential safety and other violations, according to federal records obtained by the Times. Those investigations were referred to the Department of Homeland Security under a Biden administration program that encourages immigrant workers, including those in the country illegally, to cooperate with regulators. The records do not indicate the status of the investigations, and a department spokesperson did not respond to requests for more information.
In addition, the records show that an Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation into Rich Products, the food manufacturer, was similarly referred to Homeland Security.
Snider-Blake did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Rich said the company does not hire workers in the country without legal permission, but “we cannot speak to the practices” of the staffing agency. She said that the company was “heartbroken” by Ogunyemi’s death but that the incident was “not representative of our culture of safety.” She described the referral of the OSHA investigation to Homeland Security as “procedural.”
Many workers in the country illegally are afraid to speak out for fear of being fired or deported. More than two dozen in Illinois agreed to talk on the condition that they not be identified. Reporters focused on the food industry in the Chicago area.
The workers spoke of staffing agencies and corporations that expected them to master hazardous jobs with minimal or no training, discouraged the reporting of injuries, and let go of workers when they were badly hurt.
At a Rana Meal Solutions factory in Bartlett, Illinois, temporary workers were required to clean pasta machines without fully shutting them down, according to a lawsuit filed by one of them. The man, an immigrant from Venezuela working for Surge Staffing, had his right hand caught in a machine that suddenly turned on. The injury required that his arm be amputated. After the accident, OSHA fined Rana Meal Solutions $178,118 for exposing workers to hazards from moving parts and other violations.
Among the workplace deaths identified by the Times, was a woman in the U.S. illegally from Honduras who was decapitated while working as a cleaner at the Miracapo Pizza Co. in Gurnee, Illinois. The facility has mixed, baked, packed and shipped frozen pizzas for brands including Newman’s Own, Hunt Brothers Pizza and Quest Nutrition.
The woman, Leily López Hernández, 31, had been sent by Xcel Staffing Solutions and was cleaning around a machine that carries pizza crusts on a conveyor belt as they cool.
At the time of the accident, in December 2022, the company was owned by an affiliate of Henry Crown and Co., the privately held firm that manages assets for the wealthy Crown family. It was acquired by private equity firm Brynwood Partners this year.
The Department of Labor investigated both Miracapo and Xcel for labor violations and referred the investigations to Homeland Security, according to the Homeland Security records under the Biden administration program involving immigrant workers.
Miracapo Pizza, Rana Meal Solutions, Xcel Staffing, Surge Staffing, Henry Crown and Co., Brynwood Partners, Walmart, Hunt Brothers Pizza and Quest Nutrition did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment.
Sysco and Newman’s Own said that they take worker safety seriously and expect their suppliers to follow their codes of conduct. Sysco said it would investigate the reports involving the Rich facility. Newman’s Own said it had not received pizzas from Miracapo’s Gurnee facility in the past year.
‘Demonstrated Indifference’
Dozens of temporary workers at multiple worksites told the Times that safety complaints were met with indifference, retaliation or threats of dismissal. And because many of them were working illegally, they were afraid to involve state or federal agencies.
Government systems for enforcing labor laws depend almost entirely on workers who are willing to come forward. This creates a perverse incentive for companies to hire people who are unlikely to complain, said Janice Fine, a professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University.
“Undocumented immigrant workers are doing all these critical jobs in the U.S. economy,” she said. “Although they are supposed to be protected by our laws, they often aren’t. And employers know that.”
Stephen C. Dwyer, president of the American Staffing Association, a trade group, said that while there are “bad actors” in the industry, the vast majority “are law-abiding, good corporate actors that want to do right by the workers.”
He added, “Staffing firms that continue to place workers in dangerous situations will face financial repercussions.”
The industrial pizza-making process can depend upon enormous machines with razor-sharp cutters, fast-moving rollers and needlelike pins. At the Rich facility in Crest Hill, Illinois, the deep cleaning of the machines usually happened at night, when temporary sanitation workers scraped, soaped and scoured them to remove food debris, according to four former Rich employees who spoke on the condition that they not be identified because they still work in the industry.
Some supervisors at Rich, the former employees said, often pushed the sanitation staff to work quickly. That demand, they said, spurred some workers to clean the machines while they were running, which can be dangerous and can also violate federal regulations. The police report in Ogunyemi’s death also said multiple witnesses “stated that it was a common practice to clean the machines while the belts were moving to speed up the process.”
The spokesperson for Rich strongly disputed the suggestion that its employees had pressured the sanitation workers, and pointed out that OSHA had not raised such concerns. “This is not representative of who we are and how we treat our people,” she said.
OSHA requires that workers be protected from contact with an operating machine. During cleaning, in some cases, sanitation workers are allowed to use special tools and physical barriers to keep safe. But in most instances, regulations require that machines be shut down and locked before cleaning — a process known in the industry as “lockout/tagout” — because a running machine can ensnare a worker.
The former Rich employees said they had seen or heard of other workers getting pulled into machines — usually after their clothing got snagged in the moving parts. Two said that they had experienced close calls. “It’s easy to get pulled in there,” one said. “You’re going to be jerking all around, trying to get yourself up out of it.”
According to OSHA, lockout/tagout problems are among the most frequently cited safety violations across all industries. The agency found more than 2,500 such violations during fiscal year 2023.
Five months before Ogunyemi was crushed in July 2021, OSHA investigated the Crest Hill factory when a worker’s gloved hand was pulled between a roller and bar of a conveyor, fracturing his wrist. In that case, OSHA fined Rich $37,000 for failing to properly train employees on safety and use of lockout/tagout procedures.
After Ogunyemi’s accident, OSHA fined Rich $145,000 and placed it on its enforcement list of employers that “have demonstrated indifference” to OSHA rules “by committing willful, repeated or failure-to-abate violations.”
The Rich spokesperson said, “We’ve doubled down on safety and training enhancements” since the incident. “It is important to stress that the Crest Hill of 2024 is not the same as the Crest Hill of 2021.”
At Miracapo, a month before López Hernández died, a worker suffered an amputation of two fingertips. In that case, OSHA fined Miracapo $290,191 for not properly implementing lockout/tagout procedures and for exposing workers to unguarded rotating shafts.
A coroner’s report found that López Hernández died because of “sharp force and crushing injuries of face and neck.” According to the Gurnee Police Department, video footage showed that “she began to use a long air hose with an attachment to blow dust from the oven, conveyor belt and the cylindrical machine.” She then moved out of the camera’s view. About 20 minutes later, the camera captured another worker running for help.
The police report said her body was found underneath the machine. Her head was several feet away.
Portions of the video, obtained through a public records request, showed that the machine was running when López Hernández was found. OSHA records show that the agency later cited Miracapo for willful violations of lockout/tagout rules on seven machines, including the cylindrical machine.
Six staffing agency workers who cleaned machines at Miracapo in December 2022 told the Times that the company had them keep the machines running. They asked not to be identified because of their immigration status.
Miracapo’s current and previous owners and Xcel Staffing did not comment. According to a deposition given in May by a Miracapo vice president, Lee Hodson, the evening López Hernández died she was “responsible for cleaning conveyors near the ambient spiral,” but not the machine itself. Another person familiar with the accident disputed whether cleaning workers were told to leave the machines running.
A news release from OSHA after its investigation said that Miracapo had failed to provide workers with the locks needed to properly secure machines before cleaning, and failed to “train employees in a language that they understood.”
“This tragedy took the life of a young woman, and forever changes the lives of her family, friends and co-workers,” Doug Parker, a Labor Department assistant secretary, said in the release. “Safety standards are put in place to prevent these kinds of tragedies.”
Miracapo was fined $2.8 million. OSHA records show that the company contested the fine, but offer no further details.
‘Life Without Meaning’
The family of López Hernández, a mother of two boys, filed a lawsuit against Miracapo, Henry Crown and Co. and others, claiming their negligence had led to her death.
The action against Miracapo was dismissed in court after Miracapo’s lawyer successfully argued that the company could not be held responsible because López Hernández was employed by Xcel, the staffing agency, and was therefore a borrowed employee under Illinois law.
“Whether Miracapo was a good employer, a bad employer or an indifferent employer doesn’t matter,” the lawyer, Robert Carson, told the judge.
Factory owners typically buy workers’ compensation insurance for their employees, which serves as an incentive to maintain a safe working environment so that premiums don’t increase. But when staffing agencies are involved, they often pick up the tab, leaving some business owners less concerned about workplace safety, according to several lawyers who specialize in workers’ compensation claims.
“This is something that I’ve always thought was fundamentally wrong with our system,” said one of those lawyers, Jose Rivero.
In López Hernández’s case, Miracapo did not directly provide the insurance for Xcel Staffing’s employees, instead contracting out that responsibility to the agency. And the company may not be sued separately over the death because the court ruled that it was protected under the state law that deals with so-called borrowed employees.
“They get to have their cake and eat it too,” said Jackie Kurth, a lawyer for López Hernández’s family.
The family did make a claim with Xcel. They reached a settlement in August. A close family friend said Thursday that the family had yet to receive payment.
Ogunyemi’s family made a claim with Snider-Blake, the staffing agency he worked for at Rich, and they have been receiving about $1,200 monthly in benefits. In addition, the staffing agency paid $8,000 toward the burial.
His estate is also suing Rich, which sought to have the action dismissed, but a judge ruled that the company had not shown that Ogunyemi fit all the criteria of a borrowed employee.
The situation is complicated by the family being in Nigeria. Ogunyemi’s widow, Adeola, said in an interview that her family was unable to get visas to attend his burial. A Chicago roommate, Femi Matimoju, made the arrangements and livestreamed the funeral for the family.
In a tribute, Adeola Ogunyemi shared that missing her husband was like “listening to music without sound and living a life without meaning.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.