How a staffing, janitorial, security, landscaping or administrative support business operates
The typical employer in this industry sells labor and services performed on premises it does not control, under contracts whose volume is set by the customer's operating level. Its revenue is billed by the hour a placed worker works on the customer's floor, by the square footage and frequency of the buildings it cleans, by the guard-hour at posts it does not own, by the season's maintenance and installation on grounds it does not own, and by the seat, call or transaction it handles for a customer's own customers. Its own premises are a recruiting office, a dispatch desk or a call floor. Its supply chain is people, recruited, screened, fingerprinted, drug-tested, credentialed and transported, and, for landscaping, seasonal labor admitted under a federal visa program together with plant material, fuel and equipment bought from suppliers in other States. The Suspension Clause asks whether "the operation of the trade or business" was fully or partially suspended, and a partial suspension is "a temporary delay, interruption, or termination of a portion an employer's business."1 The ten functions below are the portions. Each is one an order reached in 2020 and 2021, and each is coded in the vocabulary the Library uses. The instruments themselves, with dates and exhibit identifiers, are stated in the layers and quarters sections that follow and applied function by function after them.
The segments and their scale
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' seasonally adjusted payroll series place the industry's segments, in thousands, at the following levels in February 2020 and April 2020: administrative and support services (NAICS 561), 8,798.2 and 7,200.0; employment services (NAICS 5613), 3,526.2 and 2,522.8, of which temporary help services (NAICS 561320), 2,888.1 and 1,950.4; business support services (NAICS 5614, including telephone call centers, NAICS 56142), 863.2 and 774.2; investigation and security services (NAICS 5616), 955.8 and 872.1; and services to buildings and dwellings (NAICS 5617, which holds janitorial services, NAICS 561720, landscaping services, NAICS 561730, pest control and carpet cleaning), 2,187.4 and 1,924.5.2 Business support, security and building services had not recovered their February 2020 payrolls by September 2021. Manufacturing (light industrial) is the largest temporary-help segment, followed by office and clerical, health care (travel nurses, aides, dietary and environmental-services staff), hospitality and events. The American Staffing Association counts about eleven million temporary and contract employees a year across "virtually all industries."3 The closure orders of March 16 to 27, 2020 were measured the following week: 6,648,000 initial unemployment claims in the week ending March 28, 2020, "the highest level of seasonally adjusted initial claims in the history of the seasonally adjusted series."4
PL: placements at customer sites
A staffing agency recruits, screens and employs a worker and assigns the worker to a customer under a contract that bills the customer by the hour worked; the worker's workplace is the customer's plant, warehouse, office, hospital, school, hotel, stadium or store. The agency's revenue therefore rises and falls with the customer's headcount on site, and the agency has no work to sell when the site is closed, capped or converted to remote operation. The orders that reach PL are every closure and stay-at-home order (the customer site closed); every telework command (the customer's office emptied); every capacity, distancing, screening and face-covering order, the workplace infection-prevention and exposure-control requirements under which the placement operated at the customer's site; the essential-list classifications that decided whether the placement could be made at all ("Employment Services No" in Pennsylvania; "Staffing and/or payroll services" admitted in Maryland only as support to critical-infrastructure businesses; "temporary employment placement" essential in Delaware); and, in 2021, the OSHA Healthcare Emergency Temporary Standard (the "Healthcare ETS") at every health-care setting, the nursing-home testing rule that reaches "individuals providing services under arrangement," and the vaccination mandates whose definitions name "contract staff," "contractors," "on-site independent contractors" and persons "employed by an entity that is contracted to provide services."5
RC: recruiting, onboarding, drug testing and fingerprinting
Candidates are sourced, interviewed and screened; criminal-history checks run through State police and FBI fingerprint channels at vendor sites; drug tests are collected at occupational-health clinics; tuberculosis and health screening precede health-care placements; security-guard registration, nurse and aide licensure and food-handler cards precede others. The orders that reach RC are the fingerprint-site closures and the State orders that suspended or modified fingerprint-based checks (North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, Pennsylvania), the licensing-office and motor-vehicle closures that extended security-guard permits by order (Mississippi, New York), the elective-service suspensions that closed the clinics where pre-employment physicals and drug collections are done, and the federal drug-testing relief, which is described here by category only.6
JS: janitorial and disinfection contracts
Revenue is contracted by square footage and frequency for offices, schools, hospitals, retail and industrial sites, with disinfection as a premium line. The orders that reach JS run in two directions at once: the closure and telework orders emptied the buildings, and contract volume is tied to occupancy; the reopening orders commanded cleaning and disinfection as conditions of operating, in Pennsylvania's Worker Safety and Building Safety Orders, New Jersey's Executive Orders 122 and 192, the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration's ("MIOSHA") emergency rules, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health's ("Cal/OSHA") standard, Virginia's standard, Oregon OSHA's rule, New York's HERO Act plans and the Healthcare ETS's paragraph (j). The CISA list and the State lists named "janitorial/cleaning personnel" as continuity support at permitted sites; in 2021 the health-care and child-care mandates named "custodial services" and New York City's Emergency Executive Order 225 (the "Key to NYC" order) required proof of vaccination of the contractor's employees before they could enter the covered premises they cleaned.7
SG: security at venues and buildings
Revenue is billed by guard-hour at posts in offices, malls, stadiums, arenas, casinos, schools, hospitals, construction sites, courthouses and federal buildings. The orders that reach SG are the gathering bans and venue closures that eliminated event posts; the office and mall closures that cut posts to skeleton access control, which the CISA list described as "Security staff to maintain building access control and physical security measures"; the courthouse and federal-building closures and access limits; the licensing extensions that show the permit offices were closed; and, in 2021, the proof-of-vaccination orders that placed the guard at the door as the entity's enforcement mechanism and the federal contractor rules that reached protective-security-officer contracts.8
LS: landscaping and grounds
Revenue is seasonal maintenance and installation for residential, commercial, municipal and institutional properties, earned mostly from March through November; labor is seasonal and, for the larger companies, dependent on the H-2B program, which admits temporary non-agricultural workers under an annual cap; inputs are plant material, mulch, fuel and equipment bought from nurseries, garden centers and dealers. The orders that reach LS are the closure orders that barred or confined landscaping by name (Michigan from March 24 to April 24, 2020 and conditionally after; Washington to May 4, 2020; Vermont's crews of two, five and ten; Nantucket's prohibition of "all commercial landscaping work"; New York's guidance as updated March 27, 2020 that omitted it) and those that permitted it by name as a condition (Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Georgia, St. Louis, Massachusetts, Maryland); the garden-center closures that cut the supply of plant material; the federal H-2B instruments (the consular suspension of March 20, 2020; the rule confining 2020 flexibilities to the food supply chain; Proclamation 10052 and its extension to March 31, 2021; the FY2021 supplemental rule to September 30, 2021); and the stay-at-home orders on the customer base and the closures of the commercial properties whose grounds were maintained.9
CC: call centers and business-process outsourcing
Revenue is contracted by seat, call or transaction for customers in finance, health care, retail, utilities and government; the call floor is a dense indoor office with shared equipment. The orders that reach CC are New Mexico's one-hundred-percent call-center reduction; Delaware's closure of "customer service call centers and telemarketing operations"; Pennsylvania's "Business Support Services No"; the telework commands of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, California, Oregon, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and the District of Columbia; the capacity and distancing rules of every reopening order; and in 2021 Illinois's statewide indoor face-covering order, an airborne-transmission control imposed on every indoor public place in the State, and the workplace standards of California, Virginia, Oregon, Washington and New York.10
HR: hiring, licensing and visas
The employer hires continuously, because its product is the worker it places, posts, dispatches or seats, and every hire passes through a credential the State controls: the fingerprint check, the security-guard permit, the nurse or aide license, the work-authorization document and, for seasonal labor, the consular interview and the visa. The fingerprint, licensing and visa instruments reached hiring directly (North Dakota's and Minnesota's suspension of fingerprint-based checks; Montana's name-based substitute; Pennsylvania's closed fingerprint sites and extended deadline; Mississippi's and New York's permit extensions); the H-2B instruments reached the landscaping and hospitality segments' seasonal hiring (the consular suspension; the 2020 rule confining flexibilities to the food supply chain; Proclamations 10052 and 10131; the FY2021 supplemental rule); and Executive Order 14042 and the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force's guidance conditioned every hire for a covered federal contractor.11
OP: the employer's own offices, payroll and compliance
The employer's own office, payroll and compliance functions operated under the same telework and capacity orders as its customers' offices; the Families First Coronavirus Response Act ("FFCRA") leave mandate of April 1 to December 31, 2020 applied to every employer under 500 employees and compelled paid leave for every employee subject to a quarantine or isolation order or caring for a child whose school an order had closed; and Executive Order 14042 and the Task Force guidance reached the entire workforce of every covered federal contractor.12
WF: workforce availability
The industry's workers are hourly, transit-dependent in the large metros, disproportionately parents of school-age children and often holders of second jobs in the closed sectors. The orders that reach WF are the stay-at-home orders, the school closures of 2020 and the school infection-prevention regimes of 2021-22 (face coverings, testing and quarantine), the quarantine and isolation orders, the FFCRA and State paid-leave mandates, the transit agencies' service cuts and rider caps, and the CDC conveyance order and the Transportation Security Administration's ("TSA") directives on every commute from February 1, 2021.13
CB: the customer base
The customer base is every other industry. A staffing agency's light-industrial book is the manufacturing and logistics sectors; its clerical book is the office sector; its health-care book is hospitals, clinics and nursing homes; its hospitality and event book is hotels, arenas, stadiums and caterers. A janitorial contractor's book is offices, schools, retail and industrial sites; a security contractor's is offices, malls, venues, schools, hospitals, construction sites and government buildings; a landscaper's is homeowners, commercial property owners, municipalities and institutions; a call center's is banks, insurers, utilities, retailers and health systems. The orders that reached each of those industries are set out on this site's other industry pages, and the counterparty map below states, for each class of customer, the orders that reached it.
Counterparties, supply chain and seasonality
The counterparties are the customers (and the orders on their sites); the fingerprint and drug-testing vendors and the State police and FBI channels behind them; the licensing boards and motor-vehicle agencies; the nurseries, garden centers, equipment dealers and fuel suppliers; the uniform and chemical suppliers; the consular posts, the Department of State and the Departments of Homeland Security and Labor for H-2B labor; the State workforce agencies; the transit agencies; the schools and child-care providers; and the courts and public offices in which guards are posted, buildings are cleaned and fingerprints are taken. Landscaping earns most of its revenue from March through November, so the bars of March 24 to May 2020 fell on the season's opening; event security and hospitality staffing peak in spring, summer and the holiday retail season; temporary help peaks in the fourth quarter (retail and logistics) and the second quarter (manufacturing).
The counterparty map
For each class of counterparty, the orders that reached it were: customers in manufacturing, the plant closures of March through May 2020 in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Washington and the other closure States and the reopening screening, distancing and written-plan rules thereafter (the layers section, the fifty States); customers in offices, the telework commands and occupancy caps from March 2020 to their stepped expiry between April 4 and June 30, 2021 (the fifty States); customers in retail, hospitality, fitness, arts and entertainment, the closures, capacity caps, curfews and gathering limits of every State and metro and the proof-of-vaccination orders of 2021 (the largest metros); customers in health care, the visitor bans, elective-procedure suspensions, staff-testing rules, the Healthcare ETS and the health-care-worker mandates (the federal layer and the sector regulators); customers in education, the school closures of 2020, the remote and hybrid year of 2020-21 and the infection-prevention, testing and staff-vaccination orders of 2021-22, face coverings among them (the counterparties); government customers, the federal telework and building-access memoranda, Executive Order 13991, the Task Force rules and Executive Order 14042, and the State and local building closures and access rules (the federal layer); the fingerprint, licensing and motor-vehicle counterparties, the closure and suspension instruments of 2020 (the sector regulators); the visa counterparties, the consular suspension and the proclamations (the federal layer); and the transit counterparties, the service cuts, rider caps and face-covering rules of every metro transit agency and the federal conveyance order (the counterparties).