The Latino advocacy group OLA of Eastern Long Island has received more calls than ever from workers reporting wage theft. WSHU’s Desiree Diorio spoke to OLA’s executive director, Minerva Perez, about why workers on the east end are falling victim to unscrupulous employers.
WSHU: First, for people who might not be familiar, can you explain what wage theft is, and then explain what you’re seeing on the East End?
Perez: The definition of wage theft is when someone is working hours, not as a contractor, I mean you could apply the term ‘wage theft’ even if someone is a contractor and they have a deal, and that deal, that contract has been breached. You can, in a general sense, refer to that as you're stealing someone's money. But wages are actually defined more as you are an employee of a company.
And oftentimes, people use a purposeful misclassification of what your role is in a company, and they will call it contracting, but it's not contracting. They are telling you where to be and what to do. They are your employer. And if that employer is telling you to do a job, and you're saying, ‘Okay, I'm going to do this job,’ and then at the end of that job, they're not paying you, that is wage theft.
I'll give you an example. Because a lot of our wage theft is happening in the construction industry, the domestic industry, people cleaning homes and whatnot. So let's say in the construction industry, you will have the large builder, that company has taken on a job, maybe it's a private residence, they might hire a secondary company to do certain parts of the work, outsourcing some of the work. That company might in turn hire an individual worker, a contractor, potentially a person who does masonry or something like that, and say, ‘Okay, I'm going to give you this job, and you need to be here, you need to buy your own supplies, you need to do this job at this time frame in this amount of hours.’ And it looks like a contractor, the person doing the job might think he's a contractor. But there's been no agreement to that degree.
So it's not even necessarily what classification is on the taxes. It's also just sometimes a verbal understanding or a verbal agreement. It can also be something that's reflected in taxes where people are misclassified. And that's a whole other thing. But I'm seeing in terms of the wage theft itself, and who the folks are that are getting caught up in this, some of them definitely are working W2’s, W4’s, and some are not. But it's the idea that you are doing a job, you are not a contractor, you're doing a job. And you're being told you're getting paid X amount of money for that job, and you're not getting paid for that job.
WSHU: OLA is currently helping 22 workers claiming wage theft, the highest you’ve had in 2 decades. What’s going on?
Perez: Generally, when we see wage theft complaints and concerns come our way it’s after the end of the summer, because that is our high season typically on the East End of Long Island. And then after the summer, people will come to us in the fall and tell us that they never received their wages, or all of their wages, for the jobs they did over the summer. They usually have been promised or strung along or even threatened over the course of the season. So they continue to do the work for that entity thinking that, ‘Okay, it'll just come later.’ So generally we see that kind of concern come to us in the fall. We're always sort of ready for that.
We have always been putting out public education around wage theft, around protecting yourself: to keep track of the hours that you're working, to make sure you have things in writing, that you have receipts, that you have agreements. But we have never, ever seen the numbers that we're seeing right now, and the amount of money. Thousands of dollars, and many more people.
WSHU: Do you have any idea what’s causing the uptick?
Perez: Absolutely. I mean, we're not even anywhere close to seeing the fallout from COVID. We are not anywhere close to seeing what that has done — in a drastic way, in a very dangerous way — to our community, our year-round community. All of our community, not just Latinos, and not just Latinos who don't have full documentation are more vulnerable. But any of our folks that are living out here year-round that find a need to have 2, 3, 4 or 5 jobs to live on the East End of Long Island. The lack of housing coupled with the lack of work, or the change in the dynamics around work or the kind of work that's available, is making it easier to find new victims. The victims that are coming to us are just the tip of the iceberg.
There are people that have no desire to go to any authority, because they are afraid what's going to happen to them next if they do report these stolen wages. So that level of desperation around how to maintain that small room that you might be renting or the home that you might be hanging on to with a mortgage that is very close to being foreclosed on,...trying to hang on to that is contributing to all of this. Because people are more and more ripe for this exploitation. So housing exploitation and employment exploitation is absolutely connected out here.
WSHU: You mentioned construction workers. What other professions are you seeing victims in?
Perez: The domestic industry. So in terms of those folks who are cleaning homes, and again, it kind of works in a similar way, where you might have a contract situation, or it looks like a contractor situation. But you've got women — usually women — sent out by an entity saying, ‘Okay, clean these homes.’ Oftentimes, it's a real enterprise. They're licensed. They're insured. And they're doing a great job. But we have other entities that exist where they're sending these women out and they are not getting paid their full wages. Or they are working ridiculous hours with no compensation for working well over a 40-hour week, like 60 hours, 70 hours. There's crazy amounts of hours that will happen during the summer.
And the exploitation that's happening there is bordering on labor trafficking… We're in a bad place right now…And it's affecting everything, because it's not just Latinos that get caught up in it. It's also the families that they're connected to. It's also their children who are in our school districts who are having to live through what it means to have some of these things fall through. So that little bit of a nest egg that you had to get through the winter — which is often why people are working so hard in the summer — when that goes away and then suddenly you are now going through an eviction process. Now that entire family is being made homeless as a result of that. Everything is connected. It's a domino effect, and it is going to be the undoing of our East End.
WSHU: Is there anything workers can do to protect themselves against wage theft?
Perez: There are a few. But what I want to make very clear is that the gaslighting piece of this is extremely real. These are not dumb people, these are not people that don't understand the value of the dollar. But what ends up happening is that the threats — the promise and the threats and the desperation — you add all those things together and you're ripe for exploitation. You can mark your hours down. Most people are marking the hours that they're working, they're very clear about that. They're trying to get everything in writing. But they're up against these forces that are a much bigger force against them.
And they're also up against the housing market, where rent these days could be $3,500 or $5,000 for a two-bedroom house. They’re in the center of all of what cannot possibly work. So what OLA is looking for is other partnerships and other support systems out there across all of our municipalities, across our law enforcement agencies, our towns and our villages, any of our public facing entities that can help to make sure that people are not just waiting until they've already been victimized. But that along the way, that those entities that are employing people make sure that they’re getting the word out and protecting these folks before they become victims. And we'd like to see more of that. We need to be protecting the workforces that actually are making sure that this place can run. They’re what's generating our economy and yet we are not putting all of our attention on that.
And it cannot be just OLA. Thank God for the Department of Labor, because they have stepped up in a major way. We are sending a lot of cases directly to them. And the Department of Labor on the state side has some teeth: they can freeze accounts, they can do things that will actually stop some of the wage theft that's going on, or at least look for some of the punitive aspects of how to stop this, or inhibit and mitigate some of the growing wage theft that's going on.
At the end of the day, it's going to take all of us coming together and making sure that we agree this is not how to run an economy on the East End of Long Island.
