The calls come every week.
“Hello, my name is Ernesto,” “Me llamo Rosa,” “I am Enrique, and I wonder if you can help,” callers begin.
Their accents are thick. Their voices sound angry and vulnerable. And their messages are the same: They’ve been ripped off, robbed of their pay in a crime wave nobody talks about.
“All I have is my labor. And my labor’s been stolen,” Manuel Ruiz told me. “I thought the people should know.”
As a rule, I try to avoid writing about issues with designated days. National Lefthanders Day, Eating Disorders Awareness Day and the National Day of Listening, for example, will get no space in this column.
But Ruiz is right. People should know. So today, the National Day of Action to Stop Wage Theft, is an exception.
Wage theft means denying pay, often to undocumented workers who are the least likely to speak out.
In Ruiz’s case, wage theft involved a landscaping company that agreed to pay him $10 an hour. He raked, bagged and hauled leaves for 18 days straight this fall until he realized his boss had no intention of paying him.
In Rosa Trujillo’s case, wage theft meant cleaning houses for a company in Littleton with a promise of $80 a day. She mopped floors for a week and a half until she asked for her earnings, and her manager stopped returning her calls.
Wage theft in Sergio Padilla’s case totals $3,000, which he says a construction company owes him for six weeks of remodeling work.
“That’s $3,000 I need to eat, pay my rent, buy my medicine. It’s $3,000 I’ll never get,” he says. “Companies are taking the pants off guys like me.”
About half of all day laborers in the U.S. are people such as Padilla who say they’ve been underpaid or had their wages stolen. Fear of deportation keeps victims from coming forward.
Some Lou Dobbsians see wage theft as little more than an immigration issue. Workers who steal their way into the country shouldn’t be protected, they argue.
That logic has ruled too long at a federal Department of Labor unwilling to enforce wage laws, the Government Accountability Office reports. Obama administration Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has promised there’s “a new sheriff in town,” indicating that her agency will crack down on unscrupulous employers.
“If I owed someone $100 and didn’t pay, I’d be considered a delinquent criminal. But when a company owes a worker money, they’re protected under law,” says Lucas Torres, a worker living in Aurora. “The problem is that the laws are upside down.”
“Regardless of what are your views on immigration, I think most people would agree that a day’s work should earn a day’s pay,” adds Jesus Orrantia, program director for El Centro Humanitario in Denver.
The center is joining with lawyers and clergy members today to launch a campaign exposing wage-thieving companies and suing them for back pay.
The effort could get uncomfortable for the company that Padilla says ripped him off. Or for the landscaper Ruiz says owes him for his raking work. Or for the family on Monroe Street in Denver that docked Ruiz’s wife $5 an hour for babysitting after learning that she’s undocumented. Or for the Chinese restaurant on Colfax that has threatened deportation to the Guatemalan brothers who steam their dumplings if they keep demanding the overtime owed to them.
Very uncomfortable because the list goes on. . . . My phone keeps ringing, see, and I’m in the mood to name names.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
