Do you want to work around an inexperienced temporary worker who operates heavy machinery or who helps puts up your scaffolding?

No? Leaders in the 15 unions of the AFL-CIO Building Trades Department don't want you to, either. That's why on April 3, the building trades began an organizing and educational campaign to organize and educate individual "temps," as well as the employers that send them to job sites.

"If we do nothing, in 10 years as many workers will be referred to construction sites from temporary agencies as from union hiring halls," said Jeff Grabelsky, the Building Trades Department's director of organizing.

Work in the construction trades now rivals clerical work as the number one industry in temp work. Each day nearly 250,000 construction workers are on the job as temps.

Ten years ago, there was little temp firm presence on construction sites, says Will Collette, a research analyst at the Building Trades Department. He said that has radically changed, with temp firms such as Trade Source mimicking union hiring halls.

Collette said Trade Source operates in 15 different states and offers skilled workers across the crafts reasonable wages and benefits - in fact, the firm's wages are only a third less than union wages. And although union benefit packages are far superior, temp workers from Trade Source say their wages and benefits on the whole are the next best thing to being union.

For temporary day laborers, however, the scenario is much different. On average they make the minimum wage and often find their wages dragged well below that as temp firms charge them for transportation and safety equipment.

Addressing the AFL-CIO Building Trades annual convention earlier this month, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney hailed the Building Trades Temp Campaign as critical in stopping "predatory temp firms" and making sure that "temps get a permanent voice at work."

The temporary agencies act as nonunion hiring halls that screen, hire and dispatch workers for the construction industry. If you think they're not a threat to your job, consider this: temporary employer Kelly Services is one of the largest employers in the nation, and transition into finding employees for construction is an easy one to make. More than 400 temporary agencies are trying to land work in construction for their employees.

They're finding takers: temporary agencies are providing an astounding 35 percent of all workers in the industrial/construction sector. "They (temporary agencies) are a growing cancer in our industry," Grabelsky told the Construction Labor Report.

Ed Lenz, senior vice president for the National Association of Temporary and Staffing Services, told the Report that the temps "are no threat to collective bargaining" because their average tenure is three months on the job.

Of course they're a threat to collective bargaining - and what's worse, their inexperience also makes them a threat to the health and safety of their co-workers.