Underpaid workers taking bosses to court

[question everything]

StarTribune.com
Underpaid workers taking bosses to court

Service workers, many of them immigrants, are realizing they have a right to minimum wages, and more are suing to get back pay.

By David B. Caruso, Associated Press

5/27/07

NEW YORK - Danger and exhaustion came with the job in the decade Chen Tianyun spent as a restaurant delivery man in Manhattan. Traffic threatened to squash his scooter. He survived an armed robbery. Most weeks, he toiled 70 hours so he could send money to his family in China. For his effort, he said, he was paid $550 per month -- about $1.81 per hour. Live on your tips, his bosses told him.

Stories like Chen's are a dime a dozen among big-city immigrants, with employers long said to be ignoring labor laws and counting on silence from laborers thankful for a job. But lately, many of those arrangements have been threatened by a simmering service-industry rebellion. In recent years, low-paid workers across the country have filed a growing number of lawsuits seeking thousands of dollars in back wages from bosses they say failed to pay the minimum wage or overtime.

(snip)

In the South, the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed suits on behalf of Mexican and Guatemalan forestry workers -- in the country on guest-worker visas -- who claim to have been denied overtime and effectively paid less than minimum wage. On the Gulf Coast, the center and the National Immigration Law Center have brought similar suits on behalf of foreign-born workers who took construction and cleanup jobs and found they paid far less than promised -- or not at all.

(snip)

Attorney Michael S. Weisberg, who represents the Saigon Grill, said every worker at the company was paid at least minimum wage, which in New York is now $4.60 per hour for tipped food service workers. "They make a fortune!" Weisberg said of the delivery men, all of whom were fired after filing their suit and now picket the restaurant several times a week. He accused the workers, many of whom are Chinese nationals in the country illegally, of lying about how many hours they worked, and of unfairly turning on a boss who offered jobs without asking too many questions about immigration status. Managers at some grocery stores being sued over their treatment of baggers have said the workers weren't employees at all, and were offering their services to customers on their own time.

This month, New York's state labor commissioner, M. Patricia Smith, announced creation of a new Bureau of Immigrant Workers' Rights. It will help coordinate enforcement efforts and make sure bilingual investigators are dispatched to inspect potentially unscrupulous employers, said its new chief, Deputy Labor Commissioner Terri Gerstein.

(snip)

Courts have repeatedly rejected employers' argument that immigrant employees weren't eligible to work in the first place.

http://www.startribune.com/535/story/1207289.html

[glowing]

1. Hmmm... what happens when illegal immigrats begin forming

unions and demanding rights. These big corporations are in for a rude awakening... As history shows, when a developing nation realizes their power and begins demanding rights, they eventually persevere. What is going to happen to the billions of Chinese and Indians who begin to realize and demand workers rights to safe workplaces, environmental controls, sustainable work hours, and a better quality of life?

[Selatius]

2. It sounds like something from the early 20th century or late 19th century almost.

Fine the damn employers who exploit these workers. Fine them harshly.