284
02-16-2003, 04:40 PM
Or "why is the pay so low?"
Or "why do all these illegals keep coming here?"
--------------
Sunday, February 16, 2003 - Companies that provide mostly illegal immigrant laborers to commercial building sites nationwide are thriving even as they flout the country's most basic labor laws, a three-month investigation by The Denver Post has found.
Supporters say the companies, known in the trade as labor brokers, are part of a growing and valuable trend in commercial construction. The industry's version of a temp agency, they rent workers to contractors that are shedding full-time employees to cut costs.
But the companies, some of them million-dollar corporations that control hundreds of workers, are increasingly the subject of lawsuits nationwide and are beginning to face federal probes for violations of immigration and labor laws.
Examining the brokers' involvement in three major construction sites in Colorado, The Post repeatedly found that the companies failed to pay overtime, to insure workers against on-the-job injury, or to pay Social Security and other payroll taxes.
The emergence of labor brokers illustrates a more organized approach in the industry - away from day laborers working on small residential projects, and toward moving large groups of workers from one major construction site to another and from state to state.
...
Mike Nobles, a Tennessee-based broker who provided dozens of workers to help build the $147 million Sky Ridge Medical Center in Lone Tree last year, said his company is profitable because he relieves construction contractors of hiring hassles, providing them cheap, union-free labor.
Some of the company's drywallers lived five to a hotel room and said they made $4 to $10 dollars an hour less than the union wage of $19.70. They said they worked 56 hours a week. They were not paid overtime, nor were they covered by workers' compensation. But they didn't complain about those conditions because of their immigration status, many said.
"The way these (brokers) operate they've crossed the gray line into ... a clear violation" of labor laws, said Jim Gleason, regional director of the Mountain West Council of Carpenters.
"You're dealing with workers who are transient, who generally are undocumented immigrants, so they are easily exploitable," Gleason said. "And if these workers get hurt on the job, you know they are going to end up" in public hospitals at taxpayer expense.
Many brokers, including Nobles, claim that technically, they don't employ the workers at all. Nobles said that his men are required to sign a form that designates them as independent contractors, making them ineligible for overtime and requiring them to pay their own taxes.
...
Nobles, who initially defended his $6 million a year company, said he is rethinking many of his practices as the result of inquiries by The Post and conversations with his lawyers. But, he said, in an industry that depends on undocumented immigrants for much of its labor, abuses will continue because they are profitable.
"You don't have to worry about workman's comp payments with Mexicans because they are afraid to go to the hospital. They're not going to file a big claim and sue you like the Americans are. That's what this boils down to," Nobles said. "We have these people intimidated."
As worrisome as brokers' labor practices, say immigration officials, is the companies' ability to move hundreds of illegal immigrants around the country.
"These guys can move 300 or 400 people from one big city to another without having to look over their shoulder or without any concern about it," said Gary Evans, a Memphis-based INS agent who spent almost two years investigating brokers in Tennessee and other states.
"Anytime you can do that, then the immigration service, the whole federal government, doesn't really have the resources to control it," he said.
While The Post found brokers providing workers to some of the state's major construction projects, they don't show up on projects' organizational charts and no state enforcement agency contacted by the newspaper knew of their existence.
Many of the brokers are headquartered in Southern right-to- work states with booming immigrant populations and weak labor- law enforcement. Their use of undocumented workers - and the ability to move those workers quickly between states - makes it difficult to build cases, investigators said.
...
"If the INS does come to call, the contractor doesn't care. It's not his problem," said Will Collette, who has studied brokers for the AFL-CIO in Washington.
...
"We have so much pressure to cut costs," Nobles said. But "the owners of the buildings - they want to wink at it and ignore it, and then if anything goes wrong, they want to blame it on somebody like me."
...
In Colorado, The Post's investigation focused on brokers who provided workers for HealthOne's Sky Ridge site in Lone Tree, a State Farm Insurance office campus in Greeley and an Intel chip plant in Colorado Springs. Of more than a dozen workers interviewed, most admitted they were in the country illegally, although some said they provided brokers with fake Social Security numbers or green cards.
Among The Post's findings:
* Laborers worked long hours but were never paid overtime, a legal obligation regardless of employees' immigration status.
At the HealthOne site, at least two brokers provided workers to the drywall subcontractor, Tennessee-based Delta-United Specialties, a company spokesman acknowledged. The drywallers worked a set 56 hours a week and were paid a straight hourly wage of $8-$16 per hour, the workers said.
Fernando Morales worked on the Greeley State Farm project for an Atlanta-based broker called Eagle Managed Subcontractors, or EMS. He said he worked 48-hour weeks without overtime there, and between 60 and 80 hours a week at other EMS-brokered sites nationwide.
"You work so much you don't know what day it is," he said.
EMS refused repeated requests from The Post for comment.
* Workers for both Nobles and EMS said they were required to sign forms designating themselves as independent contractors in order to get and keep jobs with the brokers. While Nobles said he made sure those forms were translated into Spanish, federal investigators said some brokers didn't bother to do even that, making it doubtful their Spanish-speaking workers understood what they were signing.
...
At the HealthOne site, workers said the brokers did not deduct taxes from their wages, and paid neither Social Security nor unemployment taxes. Some of the workers said they were paid in cash.
* None of the brokers contributed to workers' compensation, according to state records.
Both Delta and Omaha-based Eliason and Knuth (E&K) Cos., the drywall subcontractor at the State Farm site, said their brokers sign contracts pledging to obey federal and state labor laws. "If they don't, that's their problem not mine," said Shawn Burnam, E&K's unit manager in Denver.
...
In several cases, workers said brokers skimmed from their wages. Nobles' CPI Systems deducted $600 from workers' pay, promising to get them work visas. Half the money went to the INS while the other half went to Nobles as a processing fee, the broker said.
CPI employees said the visas were never granted and Nobles refused to return the money when some workers asked for it.
...
In Greeley, a worker said EMS deducted 10 percent from his check "for taxes," a level that does not correspond to either federal or state tax rates.
In Omaha, carpenters union organizer Joe Avila said EMS drywallers working at a convention center told him the broker deducted nearly 15 percent of their weekly checks for what they were told was insurance. When a worker suffered a serious back injury on the job, EMS paid part of the doctor's bills, then fired the worker, Avila said.
...
"It's getting so you almost have to use them in order to compete," Caya said.
...
A $5.6 million-a-year business that operated in several Western and Southern states, Brother's supplied hundreds of workers, nearly all illegal immigrants, to some of the country's major drywall contractors, investigators said. In some cases, workers were recruited through Spanish-language newspapers along the U.S.-Mexico border, but most were already in the U.S.
By claiming its workers were independent contractors, not employees, the company evaded more than $500,000 in payroll taxes over 15 months, and bilked its workers out of $1 million in overtime, according to the indictment and a Labor Department source familiar with the case.
Cantu also deducted 10 percent from workers' checks, telling them it was for insurance. Investigators said the money went directly to the broker.
But Evans said he was most stunned by the broker's ability to move large numbers of undocumented workers across state lines at customers' demand.
Investigators who raided a Memphis hotel room found business cards suggesting that Brother's operated under more than 20 different identities. On a single site - FedEx world headquarters in Memphis - the broker provided more than 150 undocumented workers, according to the indictment.
"I used to feel that wherever I was, the immigration service had control," Evans said. "But with these guys, there is no control. You're just there and the best you can do would be (to get) a fraction to what's going on out there."
The growth of the broker industry, experts said, has been buoyed by two trends: The growing use of temporary labor by major contractors and a wave of Hispanic immigrants who flooded construction sites in the 1990s.
Contractors "are trying to get the lowest-skilled workers for the lowest amount of money to get things done separate from the main core of employees," said Thomas Juravich, a University of Massachusetts professor who has studied brokers.
Mark Erlich, director of organizing for the carpenters' union in Boston, said that model is so profitable that it is moving quickly even to heavily unionized regions such as New England.
...
Angel Flores, who worked for Brother's in Atlanta and Memphis before the indictment, said when he asked his supervisor for a $2-an-hour raise, it came with a condition.
"The manager said he'd do it, but he wanted me to give him a week's pay," Flores said.
His bosses "liked money, easy money," Flores said.
...
Current and former employees say most of Nobles' workers are Spanish-speaking undocumented immigrants.
...
"There's a little loophole in the law that says you don't have to have a Social Security number if you work guys on a W-9," the IRS form independent contractors provide their clients to establish that they will pay their own taxes, Nobles said. Workers on W-9s, unlike direct employees, do not have to prove their immigration status to their clients.
full story:
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E26289%257E1183620%257E,00.html
Or "why do all these illegals keep coming here?"
--------------
Sunday, February 16, 2003 - Companies that provide mostly illegal immigrant laborers to commercial building sites nationwide are thriving even as they flout the country's most basic labor laws, a three-month investigation by The Denver Post has found.
Supporters say the companies, known in the trade as labor brokers, are part of a growing and valuable trend in commercial construction. The industry's version of a temp agency, they rent workers to contractors that are shedding full-time employees to cut costs.
But the companies, some of them million-dollar corporations that control hundreds of workers, are increasingly the subject of lawsuits nationwide and are beginning to face federal probes for violations of immigration and labor laws.
Examining the brokers' involvement in three major construction sites in Colorado, The Post repeatedly found that the companies failed to pay overtime, to insure workers against on-the-job injury, or to pay Social Security and other payroll taxes.
The emergence of labor brokers illustrates a more organized approach in the industry - away from day laborers working on small residential projects, and toward moving large groups of workers from one major construction site to another and from state to state.
...
Mike Nobles, a Tennessee-based broker who provided dozens of workers to help build the $147 million Sky Ridge Medical Center in Lone Tree last year, said his company is profitable because he relieves construction contractors of hiring hassles, providing them cheap, union-free labor.
Some of the company's drywallers lived five to a hotel room and said they made $4 to $10 dollars an hour less than the union wage of $19.70. They said they worked 56 hours a week. They were not paid overtime, nor were they covered by workers' compensation. But they didn't complain about those conditions because of their immigration status, many said.
"The way these (brokers) operate they've crossed the gray line into ... a clear violation" of labor laws, said Jim Gleason, regional director of the Mountain West Council of Carpenters.
"You're dealing with workers who are transient, who generally are undocumented immigrants, so they are easily exploitable," Gleason said. "And if these workers get hurt on the job, you know they are going to end up" in public hospitals at taxpayer expense.
Many brokers, including Nobles, claim that technically, they don't employ the workers at all. Nobles said that his men are required to sign a form that designates them as independent contractors, making them ineligible for overtime and requiring them to pay their own taxes.
...
Nobles, who initially defended his $6 million a year company, said he is rethinking many of his practices as the result of inquiries by The Post and conversations with his lawyers. But, he said, in an industry that depends on undocumented immigrants for much of its labor, abuses will continue because they are profitable.
"You don't have to worry about workman's comp payments with Mexicans because they are afraid to go to the hospital. They're not going to file a big claim and sue you like the Americans are. That's what this boils down to," Nobles said. "We have these people intimidated."
As worrisome as brokers' labor practices, say immigration officials, is the companies' ability to move hundreds of illegal immigrants around the country.
"These guys can move 300 or 400 people from one big city to another without having to look over their shoulder or without any concern about it," said Gary Evans, a Memphis-based INS agent who spent almost two years investigating brokers in Tennessee and other states.
"Anytime you can do that, then the immigration service, the whole federal government, doesn't really have the resources to control it," he said.
While The Post found brokers providing workers to some of the state's major construction projects, they don't show up on projects' organizational charts and no state enforcement agency contacted by the newspaper knew of their existence.
Many of the brokers are headquartered in Southern right-to- work states with booming immigrant populations and weak labor- law enforcement. Their use of undocumented workers - and the ability to move those workers quickly between states - makes it difficult to build cases, investigators said.
...
"If the INS does come to call, the contractor doesn't care. It's not his problem," said Will Collette, who has studied brokers for the AFL-CIO in Washington.
...
"We have so much pressure to cut costs," Nobles said. But "the owners of the buildings - they want to wink at it and ignore it, and then if anything goes wrong, they want to blame it on somebody like me."
...
In Colorado, The Post's investigation focused on brokers who provided workers for HealthOne's Sky Ridge site in Lone Tree, a State Farm Insurance office campus in Greeley and an Intel chip plant in Colorado Springs. Of more than a dozen workers interviewed, most admitted they were in the country illegally, although some said they provided brokers with fake Social Security numbers or green cards.
Among The Post's findings:
* Laborers worked long hours but were never paid overtime, a legal obligation regardless of employees' immigration status.
At the HealthOne site, at least two brokers provided workers to the drywall subcontractor, Tennessee-based Delta-United Specialties, a company spokesman acknowledged. The drywallers worked a set 56 hours a week and were paid a straight hourly wage of $8-$16 per hour, the workers said.
Fernando Morales worked on the Greeley State Farm project for an Atlanta-based broker called Eagle Managed Subcontractors, or EMS. He said he worked 48-hour weeks without overtime there, and between 60 and 80 hours a week at other EMS-brokered sites nationwide.
"You work so much you don't know what day it is," he said.
EMS refused repeated requests from The Post for comment.
* Workers for both Nobles and EMS said they were required to sign forms designating themselves as independent contractors in order to get and keep jobs with the brokers. While Nobles said he made sure those forms were translated into Spanish, federal investigators said some brokers didn't bother to do even that, making it doubtful their Spanish-speaking workers understood what they were signing.
...
At the HealthOne site, workers said the brokers did not deduct taxes from their wages, and paid neither Social Security nor unemployment taxes. Some of the workers said they were paid in cash.
* None of the brokers contributed to workers' compensation, according to state records.
Both Delta and Omaha-based Eliason and Knuth (E&K) Cos., the drywall subcontractor at the State Farm site, said their brokers sign contracts pledging to obey federal and state labor laws. "If they don't, that's their problem not mine," said Shawn Burnam, E&K's unit manager in Denver.
...
In several cases, workers said brokers skimmed from their wages. Nobles' CPI Systems deducted $600 from workers' pay, promising to get them work visas. Half the money went to the INS while the other half went to Nobles as a processing fee, the broker said.
CPI employees said the visas were never granted and Nobles refused to return the money when some workers asked for it.
...
In Greeley, a worker said EMS deducted 10 percent from his check "for taxes," a level that does not correspond to either federal or state tax rates.
In Omaha, carpenters union organizer Joe Avila said EMS drywallers working at a convention center told him the broker deducted nearly 15 percent of their weekly checks for what they were told was insurance. When a worker suffered a serious back injury on the job, EMS paid part of the doctor's bills, then fired the worker, Avila said.
...
"It's getting so you almost have to use them in order to compete," Caya said.
...
A $5.6 million-a-year business that operated in several Western and Southern states, Brother's supplied hundreds of workers, nearly all illegal immigrants, to some of the country's major drywall contractors, investigators said. In some cases, workers were recruited through Spanish-language newspapers along the U.S.-Mexico border, but most were already in the U.S.
By claiming its workers were independent contractors, not employees, the company evaded more than $500,000 in payroll taxes over 15 months, and bilked its workers out of $1 million in overtime, according to the indictment and a Labor Department source familiar with the case.
Cantu also deducted 10 percent from workers' checks, telling them it was for insurance. Investigators said the money went directly to the broker.
But Evans said he was most stunned by the broker's ability to move large numbers of undocumented workers across state lines at customers' demand.
Investigators who raided a Memphis hotel room found business cards suggesting that Brother's operated under more than 20 different identities. On a single site - FedEx world headquarters in Memphis - the broker provided more than 150 undocumented workers, according to the indictment.
"I used to feel that wherever I was, the immigration service had control," Evans said. "But with these guys, there is no control. You're just there and the best you can do would be (to get) a fraction to what's going on out there."
The growth of the broker industry, experts said, has been buoyed by two trends: The growing use of temporary labor by major contractors and a wave of Hispanic immigrants who flooded construction sites in the 1990s.
Contractors "are trying to get the lowest-skilled workers for the lowest amount of money to get things done separate from the main core of employees," said Thomas Juravich, a University of Massachusetts professor who has studied brokers.
Mark Erlich, director of organizing for the carpenters' union in Boston, said that model is so profitable that it is moving quickly even to heavily unionized regions such as New England.
...
Angel Flores, who worked for Brother's in Atlanta and Memphis before the indictment, said when he asked his supervisor for a $2-an-hour raise, it came with a condition.
"The manager said he'd do it, but he wanted me to give him a week's pay," Flores said.
His bosses "liked money, easy money," Flores said.
...
Current and former employees say most of Nobles' workers are Spanish-speaking undocumented immigrants.
...
"There's a little loophole in the law that says you don't have to have a Social Security number if you work guys on a W-9," the IRS form independent contractors provide their clients to establish that they will pay their own taxes, Nobles said. Workers on W-9s, unlike direct employees, do not have to prove their immigration status to their clients.
full story:
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E26289%257E1183620%257E,00.html