PITTSTON TWP. - A person claiming to be a T.J. Maxx employee who declined to be identified in any way painted a picture of plant procedures Monday night at a Pittston Township Board of Supervisors meeting.
In the heat of the exchange, Pittston Township Police Department Chief Stephen Rinaldi revealed results of an ongoing investigation.
"We subpoenaed their applications three weeks ago and we have received 700 of them. Of those, 180 have been inspected and 90 are illegal," Rinaldi said.
Rinaldi later made it clear that he was talking about I-9 forms, which prove the eligibility of workers to seek employment in the United States.
Information from the T.J. Maxx employee largely went along with that assessment. Even with anonymity and without proof of employment, his intricate knowledge of company procedure was convincing.
The speaker described a plant where management is friendly, but pay scales are not. A plant where the work areas are spotlessly clean, but the hiring practices are not spotless. A plant where the benefits are honest, but the advertisements that led the speaker to apply were not.
He started, though, with a question. "People are saying there's a written promise somewhere that T.J. Maxx was going to pay certain wages and I want to know if that's true?"
"We were told such an agreement would have been unenforceable, and as far as I know it does not exist," Supervisor Tony Attardo answered. "We were gullible, I know I was, and we made a mistake."
Conversation moved to the makeup of the work force, known to be largely Hispanic and alleged to be largely illegal.
Asked about the makeup of the work force, the speaker said that white Anglo-Saxons were now in the minority and Hispanics in the majority but also said almost all of the workers do live in the general area. The speaker stated the number of employees has dropped from about 700 to approximately 500 because of the low wages. He said pay started at $6.50 an hour and went up $1 per hour for those who joined the union before the contract was ratified.
Town supervisors have said that T.J. Maxx promised and advertised much higher wages before the plant opened.
The speaker described a job that provided good health benefits, fair sick and personal leave and a friendly atmosphere, saying, "It's really a pretty good place to work, except for the wages."
People at the meeting decried the fact that residents of Pittston Township had few jobs at T.J. Maxx and couldn't afford to live on the wages the company paid. One woman, who identified herself only as Angela, said, "We're going back to the times of the coal mine days, where the owners made all the money and they brought in poor immigrants to work for slave wages."
Returning to the immigration issue, Attardo said, "The day the immigration people were supposed to come, 80 employees didn't show up for work and 100 more left by lunchtime."
The T.J. Maxx employee who spoke agreed, saying, "They left in groups of two or three. There wasn't a rush for the door, but a lot of people left."
At one time or another, each supervisor made the point the issue wasn't racism but broken promises, particularly in light of the 10-year tax abatement the town had given the company.
"If I knew then what I know now, they would never have put that plant there," Supervisor Joe Adams said. "They would have had to shoot me first."