CHICAGO — Ty Inc. became one of the world’s largest manufacturers of stuffed animals thanks to the Beanie Babies craze in the 1990s.
But it has stayed on top partly by using an underworld of labor brokers known as raiteros, who pick up workers from Chicago’s street corners and shuttle them to Ty’s warehouse on behalf of one of the nation’s largest temp agencies.
The system provides just-in-time labor at the lowest possible cost to large companies — but also effectively pushes workers’ pay far below the minimum wage.
Continue reading this story on Propublica.org
RELATED: Marketplace teamed up with ProPublica for a special joint investigation to examine the active “raitero” system in Chicago’s Little Village, the largest Mexican community in the Midwest. Follow more coverage in our series Taken for a Ride: Temp Agencies and ‘Raiteros’ in Immigrant Chicago.
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