Posted on 12/23/2004 6:54:55 PM PST by nanak
Wal-Mart faces a class-action lawsuit that claims it knew full well its cleaning contractors were hiring
illegal immigrants, paying them slave wages and locking them inside the stores at night.
All in the name of everyday cheap prices
by Brita Brundage -
December 23, 2004
Wal-Mart. That boxy behemoth with its neatly stacked rows of toilet paper and DVDs, trampolines and hooded sweatshirts, cheese balls and wrapping paper. With its employees wearing the signature bright-blue smocks emblazoned with sunny yellow smiley faces. Here, shoppers push carts piled high with discount electronics, cookies and XXL T-shirts along endless waxed aisles that gleam in the fluorescent lighting. Wal-Mart is the very epicenter of American consumerism. It is the hive, the mothership, of gluttonous Christmas shopping. Wal-Mart has everything, and everything it has is cheap.
It's difficult, while shopping for rock-bottom bargains at the Wal-Marts in Norwalk, Danbury, Stratford and Shelton, to pause and ask oneself, "How does Wal-Mart manage to charge so little for the cookies I covet, and how did these floors get so shiny?"
Karen Burk, a Wal-Mart spokesperson from the retail giant's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., is happy to answer in her measured, polite-but-firm, Southern voice.
"We try to cut our costs, whether it's through distribution or transportation or a variety of different ways," she explains. "Any way we can cut our costs we do..."
It sure sounds like a smart business model: cut the costs, pass the savings (in Wal-Martspeak "everyday low prices") on to the customers (primarily low-income women). The only problem is, cutting costs includes hiring illegal immigrants to work as janitors. Hired by Wal-Mart through contractors, these workers have been systematically underpaid, denied health assistance and vacations, forced to work overtime for no pay, and locked inside the stores at night. If they complained, they were threatened with deportation.
Becoming the world's largest retailer, with sales of nearly $259 billion in 2003, is an impressive feat. But to have grown the company on the backs of underpaid "associates"--mostly women, again, (see "Women vs. Wal-Mart," page 12) and the elderly--and by exploiting undocumented workers, sets a frightening precedent. Wal-Mart is, after all, the business model to which all other businesses aspire.
Wal-Mart has been under federal investigation for years, but not until Oct. 23, 2003, did the magnitude of its exploitation of undocumented workers come to global attention. On that date, U.S. law enforcement executed "Operation Rollback," raiding 61 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states and rounding up 250 illegal immigrants. It was a veritable United Nations of janitors--workers from Mexico, Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Mongolia. What the government had uncovered was nothing short of a 21st-century sweatshop, where impoverished individuals from around the world were smuggled to Wal-Mart's cleaning contractors through highly paid human traffickers; during their tenure with Wal-Mart, they worked all but two days of the year, were denied overtime pay and lived in squalid, overcrowded apartments. Four of these workers were arrested at the Shelton store as part of the raids. While exposing and deporting hundreds of illegal immigrants was the focus of the undercover operations, government officials were also targeting Wal-Mart for its role in employing these workers. They confiscated boxes of documents from the store's Arkansas headquarters and a federal grand jury is still convened to this day in Williamsport, Pa., deciding the extent of the retailer's criminal activity.
After the raids, nine of the immigrants filed a suit in state court in New Jersey, with Cuban lawyer Gilberto Garcia of law firm Garcia and Kricko. Before that case developed, New York City attorney James L. Linsey of Cohen, Weiss and Simon LLP, contacted Garcia, and the two decided they had a case that was more far-reaching than a state court complaint. Together, they filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of thousands of affected Wal-Mart janitors last November. The case, Zavala v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. , makes claims against the company for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, including overtime violations and minimum pay violations. In addition, it charges Wal-Mart with forced labor, false imprisonment and civil rights violations. To top it off, the lawsuit claims that Wal-Mart--specifically the "Wal-Mart Enterprise"--violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, for operating in criminal conspiracy with its cleaning contractors.
As far as Linsey is concerned, this is a landmark case for undocumented workers, akin to Rosa Parks' action on a Montgomery bus forcing the Supreme Court to outlaw segregation.
"Basically, it's a case of one of the largest, most powerful corporations [in the world] taking obscene advantage of the weakest and most vulnerable people in the world--undocumented immigrants," Linsey says. "They're afraid to go to authorities, they're afraid to complain, they don't speak English, they don't have any money [and] they don't have any transportation."
There are 17 class representatives in the lawsuit, including Victor Zavala of Mexico, for whom the case is named, each with a similar story that, even in dry legal language, shows a known pattern of abuse at the hands of Wal-Mart's contractors. Zavala worked for Wal-Mart for 36 months for a weekly sum of $500. Many others in the suit were paid only $350 a week. Though Zavala and the others were obligated to work seven days a week, for 60 hours or more, they received no overtime pay. They and others were locked in the stores at night and could not leave unless a Wal-Mart store manager came to release them. As Linsey explains, the janitors were locked in to prevent "inventory shrinkage." The janitors received no sick leave pay and had no taxes withheld from their pay. Of the meager wages they earned, many of the workers were required to pay an additional $500 "security deposit" to their employers to ensure that they would not leave, a sum that was never returned.
One of the janitors, Antonio Flores, who is diabetic, cut his hand severely while working for Wal-Mart. The lawsuit states "because he was locked in, he was forced to wait until the next morning to go to a hospital." One 26-year-old man from the Czech Republic spoke to the Prague Post last year about his three-day experience working for Wal-Mart, a job he quit due to the horrible conditions. Ondra, who refused to give his last name, said, "I met two [Czech] guys. They were in Chicago for two years. All they did was work, cleaning every day, 365 days a year. They had never been to the downtown Chicago Loop. ...It's slavery."
One of the strongest indicators of the kind of exploitation workers suffered at the hands of Wal-Mart comes from an unlikely source. Greta McCaughrin, a professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, was called by the Lexington Police Department in 1999 to translate for five Russian immigrants who worked as Wal-Mart janitors, a couple of whom had been caught stealing Wal-Mart merchandise. McCaughrin was shocked by the treatment of the janitors, from the callousness of the Wal-Mart store manager to the filthy conditions of the immigrants' shared apartment. Shocked enough that she sent a letter to then-Wal-Mart President and CEO David Glass, which is viewable at the website for the class-action suit, www.walmartjanitors.com.
Although one of the innocent Russians was instrumental in helping the store recover the merchandise, McCaughrin writes that the store manager, Jason Taylor, told the janitor, "You will never again set foot in my store, or in any other Wal-Mart store." The following day, according to her letter, "Mr. Taylor called the same cleaning service that brought him these five janitors, and five additional Russians and Georgians were put on a bus from NYC, arriving in time to work in his store the very next day..." All 10 were forced to reside in the same apartment building where, she says, "there are no beds, only mattresses and carpeting."
Another letter was sent to current Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott in 2002 from cleaning contractor Raymond Drude, who had been priced out of business by competitors using immigrant labor. Initially, Drude's business, Jani King, had serviced 15 Wal-Mart stores in the Gulf Coast region. That number had dwindled to five because, as Drude described, he was operating within the law.
"Each and every store was lost to a District Manager giving the contract to a Ukranian, Czech, or Russian national posing as legitimate janitorial companies," his letter states. Drude then asked the Wal-Mart CEO, "Why would Wal-Mart do business with companies that hire illegal aliens?"
Throughout the ongoing federal investigations, Wal-Mart has claimed full compliance with authorities while passing the blame to its outside contractors. While the October 2003 raids made the Wal-Mart investigation headline news, and made the company itself a target for investigation, previous smaller federal investigations had already focused on the company's longstanding relationship with cleaning companies employing undocumented workers.
In November 1998, police arrested an 18-year-old illegal Russian immigrant in a Honesdale, Pa., store. In March 2001, two agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) met with Wal-Mart employees at the Arkansas headquarters to discuss their investigation. Later that month, 27 illegal immigrants were arrested at Pennsylvania Wal-Marts. Between October and November 2001, INS raids in four states netted 80 illegal immigrants. Because Wal-Mart did not believe itself to be a target, it did nothing to curb its reliance on the cleaning contractors. Wal-Mart spokesperson Mona Williams told The New York Times that, "It probably sounds a little naïve now, but we were simply trying to help our government and cooperated closely with federal officials for three years."
Burk, the Wal-Mart representative who spoke with the Weekly , offered a similar explanation. In her view, Wal-Mart has been targeted simply because of its size and profitability. The media, not Wal-Mart, is to blame.
"Our image is always going to take some hits," Burk says. "We're out there; we're a big target. I think the important thing to always focus on for us is to take care of our customers. And to take care of our associates. And as long as we're focusing on that, I think that our customers know that we're trying to do the right thing."
As the class-action suit gains momentum, Wal-Mart will not be able to hide behind its "we're trying" explanations. Even if Wal-Mart could dismiss the letters sent by concerned citizens like McCaughrin or contractors like Drude, there are far too many indications that Wal-Mart's executives knew exactly who its contractors were hiring, and how they were being mistreated. If the past investigations weren't large enough red flags, Wal-Mart's own store managers were the ones with the keys locking up the illegal immigrants and letting them out in the morning. And in the small towns where Wal-Marts are located--Little Falls, Minn., say, or Farmville, Va. --a gaggle of Mongolian, Polish, Russian, or Czechoslovakian immigrants can't help but attract attention.
"Wal-Marts are not located in cities like Manhattan," says Linsey. "They're located in rural areas where everybody knows everybody else. These are towns like [on TV's The Andy Griffith Show ] Mayberry... Barney knows Andy, and Andy knows Aunt Bee. And all of a sudden you've got Mongolians. They look different; they don't speak English. They congregate amongst themselves. And they're there every night of the week. So of course the store manager knows."
What McCaughrin alerted Wal-Mart's CEO about in 1999--a Wal-Mart store manager standing in a police station, threatening the janitors and later calling up for another five Russians--is nothing short of trafficking, according to Linsey. And it's that kind of knowing criminal maneuvering that implicates Wal-Mart in an ongoing criminal conspiracy, Linsey says. The international nature of Wal-Mart's alleged crimes, its cozy relationship with abusive contractors who have, for years, profited off undocumented workers, have made this case one of worldwide concern. The Czech Republic filed an amicus brief on behalf of its citizens, noting that there are "international human rights conventions which set universally recognized standards for all human beings including illegal migrant workers." The Mexican government filed an amicus as well, to "ensure the principles of equality, equal protection of the law and non-discrimination vis a vis the denial of fundamental labor rights to undocumented migrant workers..."
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in Washington, D.C., estimates that there are between 8 million and 9 million illegal immigrants residing in the United States, with at least 500,000 new immigrants entering each year. Many of these immigrants take on the country's low-wage jobs, be it working as janitors for Wal-Mart, mopping restaurant kitchens, cleaning hotel bathrooms or picking apples and onions. Many of these employers exploit their workers who, without language skills or legal status, are frightened into accepting paltry pay. How Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the United States, treats the immigrants who mop and wax its floors each night could influence the way such laborers are treated around the country.
Jonathan Blazer, a National Alliance Building Coordinator for Project Voice, a branch of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) which seeks to strengthen immigrant rights, hopes the lawsuit against Wal-Mart will spur real immigration reform.
"The allegations [against Wal-Mart] are certainly flagrant and severe," Blazer says, "particularly in terms of false imprisonment. Some of the other allegations in terms of people being forced to work for hundreds of days straight without earning any overtime, without holidays or vacation days, unfortunately are not unheard of."
While Project Voice supports the immigrants' claims in the Wal-Mart suit, it also would like to see the government take greater responsibility upholding its own labor laws. Rather than raiding Wal-Mart stores and deporting the workers who have already been exploited for years, Project Voice wants to see greater protection for those workers.
"The more outrageous parts of this case were the ways in which people were being exploited, and we, of course, have a whole set of labor laws to protect against exploitation and presumably a Department of Labor that enforces those laws," says Blazer. "It just seemed to us a very backward way to address the situation, to re-victimize the janitors and to think about the case only in terms of whether Wal-Mart knowingly hired undocumented workers. The real question is whether or not they made arrangements that were clearly intended to exploit workers, whatever their immigration status."
Project Voice supports nothing short of full legalization opportunities for all undocumented immigrants residing and working in the United States. While temporary resident status may appeal more broadly to taxpayers skittish about lost job opportunities, in Blazer's experience, immigrants are unlikely to come forward and sign up for a program if the eventual outcome is deportation. Besides, Blazer argues, "It's unjust to just treat people simply as being valuable for their labor and their work and to throw them out when you're done with them and use them up."
The threat of deportation has hindered Linsey's outreach to U.S.-residing immigrant Wal-Mart janitors as well. Most of Linsey's clients are in the Czech Republic, Mexico, Mongolia and other countries worldwide. While he was able to negotiate on behalf of some of the workers to get deferred action status in exchange for their cooperation in the federal investigation, many others have been deported.
"Of course, folks here in the United States are afraid to come forward," says Linsey, "because they're afraid they'll be deported. And they don't want to be accused of criminal activity. It's not criminal to be an undocumented worker, but they're afraid."
The first phase of the case against Wal-Mart is already under way. The federal court in New Jersey issued a hearing on Oct. 20 to consider all the counts, including the labor violations and the racketeering charges against Wal-Mart, as well as Wal-Mart's motion to dismiss. In the ensuing months, if the court agrees with the janitor's case in any part, Linsey and Garcia will "demand documents and oral testimony under oath from Wal-Mart and its officials."
Taking on Wal-Mart's legal team--from the elite international firm Wilkie, Farr & Gallagher (the firm that represents Major League Baseball and other ultra-wealthy clients) is a daunting task. But Linsey believes the alliances he and Garcia have formed with other nations have given their case a legitimacy that supercedes mere monetary might.
"Even elephants can be taken on," Linsey says. "What I would say to Wal-Mart, and really to anyone, is that Wal-Mart is a store. Certainly it's a big store, but it's just a store. These are countries... that have been around with their citizens before Wal-Mart existed and these countries are going to be around long after Wal-Mart is gone from the scene. Basically, the theme here is that you just don't treat people this way in a civilized society."
Guess who needs illegal aliens? (Hint: Not Joe-Six-Pack)
Even if they hired Americans they would "lock them in the store at night." Its what they do when they "Night stock." Duh.
Walmart Ping! Long Live the Wally!
Let's hear what the Janitors say, they might be happy to have a job...
Wal-Mart CEO made like $40 million this year.
I was told by someone who used to work at Wal-Mart that they lock the doors so the store would not get robbed blind by just a couple of the many that clean and restock at night.
Dowd lite
I used to run a janitorial company, when I just graduated out of college. The nightly lock-in is SOP.
Many in small towns close up at night.
Why so many words and no link?
I bet the same contractors provide cleaning services with the same employees to a large portion of the businesses in those towns. The class action suit will only be filed against Walmart because they have deep pockets.
Acknowledged. And that affects me how?
So if I hire a Janitorial service to clean an office building I'm responsible for who he hires and where they sleep?
This is a crock. Deport the illegals and deal with the owner of the service.
Yes, as a matter of fact you are, if it can be proven that you had knowledge of the practices. Seeing as wal-mart probably had knowledge since their stores were being locked, etc., then they are responsible.
The illegals are more than welcome to stay in their own country.
I don't see how locking your doors at night, a standard practice, proves anything. This is just lawyers eying another cash cow.
walmart is about efficiency while taking care of the consumer and the employees(enabling the less fortunate to improve too).
the government does the exact opposite.
I only have one concern about the practice- if the doors are deadbolted then it would be unsafe, but if it was just one-way locks (IOW if you leave you need someone to let you back in) then I don't see a problem. Most of the people who bash Wal-Mart are never clear about this.
The doors were locked for a reason. But even putting that aside, if it can be proven that a single wal-mart manager knew the employees of the contractor were illegal, then they are guilty.
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