To put on massive sporting events like the World Cup or the U.S. Open, many workers are needed behind-the-scenes: janitors, security workers, concessions staff, and people who support fan events and watch parties. These jobs are often fulfilled by temporary workers, who are deployed by staffing agencies and non-union jobs. Given the temporary and seasonal nature of the stadium work, it is difficult to track the whereabouts and well-being of these workers.
As a result, this temp work can be prone to bad actors: for example, workers may actually end up getting less than a state’s or city’s minimum wage because staffing agencies with online platforms require the workers to pay for said platform to list availability for shifts. Many stadiums are not required to use union staff; therefore with fewer rules, staffing agencies that may skim wages and commit wage theft can slip through the cracks.
In Seattle, a partnership between Workers’ Lab, a non-profit building worker-centered tools, and the MLK Labor Council, a project of the AFL-CIO, sought to bring good jobs with livable wages to stadiums during the World Cup. Previously, organizers had formed a $1 million labor harmony agreement with the company that leases the stadiums for Seattle’s football team, the Seattle Seahawks, and the city’s soccer team, the Seattle Sounders.
According to Rigo Valdez, a decades-long labor organizer and executive director of the AFL-CIO’s MLK Labor and Worker Innovation Center, union workers at the stadium, since the agreement, have been making over $23 an hour—above the minimum wage in Seattle. Before the agreement, 17% of stadium workers were union workers; afterwards, 82% were.
Ahead of the World Cup, leveraging FIFA coming into town, union representatives and workers’ rights advocates met with FIFA’s labor organizing representative to ensure that the values inherent to the union and the stadiums’ labor harmony agreement could be upheld and even expanded upon. The idea was, together with the community, to ensure that FIFA left something positive behind: that what happened at Qatar’s World Cup, where workers worked to literal death to prepare for the games, was not in any way replicated in Seattle.
“There needed to be a recognition that human rights include workers’ rights,” Valdez told me.
Valdez partnered with Adrian Haro and Catherine Huang from the Workers’ Lab, and together they created UNtemp, a digital platform that assigned shifts to workers so they could staff a bustling World Cup watch party at a mall near the stadium. Workers were responsible for crowd control and fan engagement, as well as food services, security staffing, and janitorial work.
As part of this initiative, all the workers who were not union workers joined the union—and together they formed a co-op, so that workers were owners in the output and could make higher wages, and so profit-sharing could occur if there were a profit.
UNtemp also was designed for workers to bid for shifts specifically in line with union rules, assigning people shifts based on seniority in the union as well as geography. (While other platforms like UNtemp do exist, the team who built UNtemp argues that those platforms not as customizable to the union rules.)
Huang and Haro reiterated to me that it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that the platform would be successful. This was an experiment. Could workers properly find and sign up for shifts? Did the platform fulfill 100% of the demand and appropriately match supply with demand? Did workers actually show up, and were they paid relatively seamlessly?
According to the stakeholders involved, the answers were yes.
Nearly 300 shifts were scheduled during the World Cup’s festivities, with 70 workers signed up for the platform and $32,000 in payments flowing through the platform to workers. While most workers were already part of the union, some users of the platform included non-union workers who then became union workers and W-2 employees—all with access to health, dental, and vision insurance.
There were no profits made from the co-op, but the co-op did break even—and, according to Valdez, workers also also felt a tremendous amount of pride and ownership in the co-op as something they generated and owned themselves. Workers even designed a logo for the co-op, called the Seattle Janitors Cooperative.
This is a stark contrast to working conditions in other cities, where unions were busted and World Cup work was cobbled together by temp work.
The experiment, while contained and relatively small in scale, made me think about how it’s also not inevitable for all gig platform work to be a race to the bottom on wages. Temp workers can provide good services for important cultural or sporting events while not feeling dispensable or disposable. And infrastructure decisions can be made to involve workers to share in the success of outcomes.
So, what’s next for UNtemp? The team at Workers’ Lab wants to scale their model to other stadiums and cities—potentially even to staff the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, and also to break through to construction sites in the South where workers and unions may face more of an uphill battle.
Valdez, of MLK Labor Council, is excited to see the app automate functions like payroll, which was handled this time manually through the employer—as well as expand to other stadiums in Seattle, and provide foreign language options for a workforce who may not be as familiar with English language interfaces.
“There’s a difference between us and for-profit platforms, because of our values,” Huang of Workers’ Lab told me. “We have a strong interest in learning, and sharing those learnings with the contemporaries in our field.”
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