Posted on 11/05/2005 2:02:16 PM PST by liberallarry
GULFPORT, Miss. - A pattern is emerging as the cleanup of Mississippi's Gulf Coast morphs into its multibillion-dollar reconstruction: Come payday, untold numbers of Hispanic immigrant laborers are being stiffed. Sometimes, the boss simply vanishes. Other workers wait on promises that soon, someone in a complex hierarchy of contractors will provide the funds to pay them.
Nonpayment of wages is a violation of federal labor law, but these workers - thousands of them, channeled into teams that corral debris, swaddle punctured roofs in blue tarps and gut rain-ravaged homes - are especially vulnerable because many are here illegally.
After Katrina hit, Armando Ojeda paid $1,200 to be smuggled across the desert border from Mexico, a walk that took several nights. Talk of $10 an hour - more in a day than he made each week at a computer factory back home - led him to pay another $1,200 to be crammed in van with a dozen other immigrants and driven 1,600 miles, from a safe house in Arizona to Mississippi.
The passengers were not fed - Ojeda recalls his mouth watering when he smelled tacos the driver ate - and were discharged near the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport, where Ojeda sleepwalked though his first day clearing hurricane-strewn junk.
The job was supposed to pay $7 an hour. But six weeks later, Ojeda still hasn't been paid the $600-plus he said he is owed for eight days of dawn-to-dusk labor.
Karen Tovar, the subcontractor on the job, acknowledged she hasn't been able to pay dozens of workers a total of about $130,000. She insisted she was not at fault, blaming the way payments can be stalled along a long chain of subcontractors often led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
At one point, Tovar had 83 workers cleaning the Navy base under a broader, $12 million contract held by KBR, a firm owned by Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton.
After several weeks without pay, many workers grew frustrated and left.
"I've told them, 'When I get paid, you will receive your funds.' And they say, 'When?'" she said. "I'm very sure it's going to be shortly."
An Army Corps spokesman said he wasn't aware of any problems with payments. A KBR spokeswoman wouldn't provide details about the base cleanup, referring inquiries to the Navy, which referred questions about subcontractors back to KBR.
Tovar said she knew of other subcontractors who disappeared with their payrolls, and wondered whether her former workers expect she will abscond to her home in North Carolina.
"I don't know if they're thinking that I've left and took the money or that I'm trying to hide the funds, because I wouldn't do that," said Tovar, 47. "In my type of work, you're working on trust."
Armando Ojeda is not trusting. He doesn't think he'll be paid, though he remains among the platoons of workers bivouacked along the coast. His goal: to wire his parents in the poor southern state of Chiapas enough money to offset the cost of his trip, which he has come to see as a folly he had to indulge before age or commitments bound him home.
"I am stupid for coming," he said, with a smile and shake of the head. "It was a foolish thing, nothing more."
Nonpayment of immigrant workers is not a new phenomenon - and it doesn't appear to be as much of an issue in New Orleans. With so much work to do and not enough laborers to do it, the market there appears to favor workers, said immigration lawyer David Ware.
What's remarkable in Mississippi is the apparent scope of the problem, though it is impossible to quantify.
In this beleaguered state, which doesn't have a labor department, the issue isn't even on the radar.
Nonpayment is not specified as a crime under Mississippi law and the state Department of Employment Security defers wage claims to the federal Department of Labor. Workers who claim back wages have two formal options: Filing a civil suit in state court or a federal complaint. Mississippi prosecutors haven't received any complaints, according to special assistant attorney general Peter Cleveland.
A spokeswoman for the federal Labor Department said she could not determine whether there have been any post-Katrina claims in the Gulf region. But there are some in the pipeline: On Friday, a representative of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance said the advocacy group had prepared complaints on behalf of more than 150 workers who are owed more than $100,000 by five contractors, including Tovar's KTS Services.
Out in the cleanup-zone, dozens of Hispanic immigrant workers interviewed by the AP shared a common refrain: "I worked without being paid."
In Gulfport, several dozen men living in makeshift bunks in a hangar-like building said they were owed tens of thousands of dollars.
Like other workers, Alfredo Roblero saw opportunity in the wreckage, and was recruited from Ft. Pierce, Fla., with promises of steady work for good wages, expenses paid.
"They bring you to nothing," said Roblero, 26, who figured he was due about $500 for five days spent demolishing what was left of the coastal Casino Magic Biloxi. "They owe you, and you wait for them."
Many of the workers wore the shirts of Dallas-based Restoration Group. In a subsequent telephone interview, company president James Rea said the workers were the responsibility of a subcontractor. He insisted all have been paid and blamed insurance companies for any delay.
"We're all standing in line and we take our piece of each dollar off as we hand it down," he said, "and eventually it gets down to the end of the line."
In a slovenly trailer park, men named Francisco and Oscar said they were owed thousands of dollars for weeks of work. Not long before, according to local immigrant advocates, more than a dozen workers were bunking in their trailer, each paying $10 per night for lodging to a subcontractor who they said then shorted them thousands of dollars.
Before that, the men had worked for - and had quit - Karen Tovar's crew.
Tovar said that the men didn't understand American pay schedules, specifically the practice of working two weeks before getting paid for the first.
"I've been to Mexico and, basically, these people live from week to week and when they come over here they have a misconception when the week is held back," said Tovar.
Tovar said that she has worked other hurricane cleanups, but never had trouble being paid by other subcontractors. While she is now receiving a steady flow of payments, she said it's not enough to pay off the $130,000 she owes 83 workers for helping clear the Navy base.
Elizabeth Martinez is another subcontractor who has been embroiled in wage disputes. She has been living among workers in a small tent city in Ocean Springs.
On Oct. 12, eight men who had been patching roofs asked a Texas-based immigrant worker advocate who was visiting the camp to help negotiate their pay.
As is often the case, the situation remains in dispute.
Advocate Anita Grabowski said the men, who came to Mississippi from Arkansas and have since scattered, worked two weeks and were due their money.
Bosses at the Alabama-based subcontractor that hired Martinez, Hughes Construction Services LLC, said the workers didn't understand that they weren't yet scheduled to be paid.
Martinez herself said she didn't hire the workers to lay roof tarps and that they were trying to extort money they hadn't earned - an increasingly common scam, she said.
Martinez said she didn't want to pay until she checked her records. But the owners of family-run Hughes decided to front Martinez more than $15,000 to pay the men - $10 an hour, $15 for overtime.
"We just wanted it to be over with," said Jody Hughes, one of three Hughes sons working the cleanup. The men were paid and agreed to find work elsewhere.
"Hughes was being intimidated," Martinez said. "To me, it's like paying off damn terrorists."
On a chill late-October evening, Martinez stood near her tent, engrossed in discussions with three more men who had driven two hours from New Orleans to complain that she hadn't paid them.
Martinez told their chief negotiator, Antonio Hernandez, that she had paid the fourth member of their roof-tarp crew, a man named Ruben who now was in Texas.
Soon summoned by cell phone, Ruben denied receiving any money. But one of Hernandez's companions acknowledged that he had seen Martinez pay Ruben something, and Martinez produced handwritten records that persuaded the men she had advanced Ruben $700 cash, which the men hadn't seen.
The men piled back into their beat-up brown van for the return ride to New Orleans with boxes of food and $150 in cash Martinez gave them "not because I owe you ... as a gift."
Just as they pulled out, Martinez flagged down four Guatemalan workers who walked into the encampment. She said a true scam artist had ripped off these unfortunates.
One by one, they explained that they had cleaned a school for 144 hours at a promised $8 an hour. Then one of their bosses dropped them on the side of the road, without food. Eventually, a church bus picked them up.
Any idea, they asked, of how to get paid?
Is this the favored Republican position?
duh.. This is why contractors hire illegals. Complain and we'll have your ass deported. Most of them will just grin and bear it.
Doing the work that Americans won't do for non-existant pay.
Good. Let the illegal immigrants go back to Mexico and Central America where they came from.
I hate slavery. I hate slave-masters. I don't care what their politics or what their excuses. Slave-masters are scum. Slavery sucks.
I noticed AP couldn't avoid that little dig.
I've always despised KBR. They've got a well deserved, bad reputation. Read recently in the Houston Comical that Halliburton is planning to sell off KBR and concentrate more on their oilfield operations.
I certainly agree with you about the slavery issue. What we learn from this is that many of the employers are not just honest employers trying to cope with a labor shortage but out and out criminals. I have never believed that their inability to recognize all those fake IDs as fakes was anything but willful ignorance that provided them cover for breaking the law. I am pleased that they are revealed for the scum that they are.
On the other hand, I really don't mind seeing the illegals get stiffed. They have broken our laws and it does not bother me if they don't benefit from it. Maybe it will encourage them to go home and when they get there they can tell all their amigos about how if they come to America they will get stiffed.
On the third hand, when employers can hire workers for free it makes it even harder for American citizens to compete in those job markets.
We should just start enforcing the laws. We desperately need some employer sanctions. Bush and Chertoff are completely AWOL in their duties.
So how is it that tax-payer money is used to support such activity? Louisiana was flogged on this forum because its Democratic governor performed so badly in an emergency. But Mississippi has a Republican governor who doesn't object to this sort of blatant thievery and exploitation? This is why working men in this country have loathed Republicans as nothing more than self-righteous, hypocritical thieves for over a century.
That and illegals preying on illegals are just a couple of the reasons I'm against illegal immigration. Besides bringing a criminal element into our country and draining our resources (hospital care etc.) these poor people can't protect themselves and have no legal recourse. If they are genuinely hard working individuals with a desire to become Americans, come in the front door and welcome! If not, stay home!
Thanks for jumping in Larry, again you'll find a number of clowns who support screwing workers. Forget them. I always call the the "Night Manager of an Bowling Alley Syndrome. "...Ya I work for minimum wage, but I'm management".
True conservatives would want them paid triple and their employers jailed and fined. Ha ha
I am tired of being strong-armed by our politicians in their coy way to provide for every want and need of border jumpers. Why reward law-breakers when I have a family to tend to?
Perhaps such employer actions will at least encourage some of the criminals and varmints to return home.
I agree. I guess I'm a conservative after all! :^)
All joking aside, I'm especially for the employers being fined and/or jailed. Jerks.
I hate illegal immigration but to do this to any person, is unconscienable.
When I was playing C&R back in Cali, many moons ago, I ended up being the "go see guy" for the illegals who got ripped off.
It was easy work, I'd start by impounding the suspects vehicle ... man, money would come out of the woodwork to keep the hook off the truck.
(A bum like me always needs to make a few points with the Man Up Stairs :^) )
Never had one of little guys lie to me either.
Well we cannot overlook the fact that Michael Moore 'owns' Halliburton. . .
How about Blanco coming up with a 'worker' liason or somesuch. . .it is the least they could do. . .what IS this state doing. . .on it's own to solve some problems?
I'm for stopping illegal immigration but this is not the way to do it.
No. It will encourage the honest men among them to become criminals.
Quite a quandry they have there...
Sounds to me that if they have all this money to spend on the cleanup...There sure are a lot of displaced N.O. residents that could get in there and do it as well...
And don't give me this crap about "where will they stay while they are working?"
Where are the illegals who are doing the work staying...Appears to be just fine for them???
They don't say specifically that this is happening only to the "immigrants", they leave it for us to assume. I wonder if there are any legal workers there and if they're getting stiffed too.
Because everyone knows that if somewhere a bird falls to earth the governor knows and is probably at fault for its demise.
Unsurprisingly, no birds ever fall to earth in Louisiana.
I'm certain there are legal workers there. Most, though, would be in higher paying jobs with better job protection.
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