News
Page 4
Street Roots • Oct. 28-Nov. 3, 2016
BY EMILY GREEN
STAFF WRITER
s big development dollars flow into
Portland amid an explosion of new
luxury apartments, McMansions and
high-rises, it’s a money grab for those
looking down from the top floor of the
construction industry.
For many laborers at the bottom,
however, it’s a gamble.
Will they get a paycheck? Will it include
payment for all the hours they worked,
including overtime? Will their earnings, at
the very least, equate to minimum wage?
Too often, the answer to those questions
is no.
“You see all these buildings right now,”
explained Jason Sheckler, a local union
carpenter, “you’ve got three stories of
concrete, which is all union, and then after
that, the next four stories on top of that are
wood framing - non-union. That’s a ton of
jobs, and that’s a ton of workers being
exploited in this town. And they’re
carpenters. We have to change that”
During the past two years, labor
regulators have found nearly 50 Oregon
construction contractors failed to pay their
workers at least $3.4 million in back
wages and overtime pay, and that
figure includes only an audit and the
two largest suits out of 260 wage
claims in the construction industry in
I
that time period.
Over the past five years, the
Oregon Bureau of Labor and
Industries, which handles prevailing
wage claims against state-funded
projects, has received 148 prevailing-
wage complaints and claims worth
$1.12 million in Multnomah County
alone.
Many of the skilled sectors in the
commercial building industry are heavily
unionized, but there are significant gaps
among wood framing and drywall
subcontractors - and among contractors
working on residential projects, from home
building to remodeling and maintenance.
Typically, it’s Latino immigrants working
for these non-union subcontractors who are
most likely to be subject to exploitation,
wage theft and threats of retaliation if they
speak up or attempt to organize.
Sheckler’s union, the Pacific Northwest
Regional Council of Carpenters, has been
sending Spanish-speaking union
representatives to non-union commercial job
sites in an effort to organize Latino workers
in recent years.
It’s an increasingly popular approach
among labor unions, many of which in the
past had blamed immigrant workers for
declining wages and job shortages.
The way the carpenters see it, if
immigrant workers are getting paid fair
wages and benefits, everyone is better off.
“It’s equal work, equal pay,” said Juan
Sanchez, a carpenters union representative.
“We do not discriminate against anybody.”
But getting workers-to show up at union
meetings isn’t easy.
Sanchez said that when he makes site
visits, workers heed the foreman’s warnings
A
REUTERS/MIKE BLAKE
doesn’t really matter,” she said. “It does
matter, because oftentimes people are not
being paid minimum wage.”
She said the sum can also be well above
minimum wage, but frequently that isn’t the
case. “Not only are they not meeting
minimum wage,” she said, “they’re not
being paid the overtime rates too.”
Property owners and developers
overseeing the projects often escape
liability, as the laborers getting ripped off
are usually two or three times removed.
This is because the developer hires a
general contractor, who often hires
subcontractors, and sometimes the laborers
are removed even further when these
subcontractors hire their workers through
labor brokers - also known as body brokers
or coyotes.
It’s also common for the contractor to pay
the labor broker a lump sum on the books,
and then the broker passes down under-the-
table cash payments to an undisclosed
number of workers.
“One of the banes of migrant labor has
always been the use of labor contractors to
recruit people,” attorney Michael Dale said.
He’s the director of a nonprofit that
represents low-wage workers, the
Northwest Workers Justice Project
He said Oregon developed a good
system for combatting wage theft
among labor brokers in the
agricultural sector by creating a
bonding and licensing structure. But
during Portland’s pre-recession
building boom in the mid-2000s, he
said those same practices began to
pop up in the construction industry.
“In fact,” he said, “some were farm
labor contractors, or people who had
been banned from being licensed farm-labor
contractors, now bringing people to work in
construction.”
He said that as the construction industry
picks up again, body brokers are making a
comeback, but it hasn’t reached pre
recession proportions yet.
He said it’s when employers can’t find
enough workers - particularly in wood
framing, drywall and painting - that they
turn to body brokers to fill the positions.
These labor brokers are a big concern of
the carpenters union as well. '
“The coyote gets paid from the
contractor, then he pays the worker cash -
if he wants to. So no income tax, no state
tax, no nothing,” Sanchez said. “The bad
thing about that is not only are the workers
getting exploited and taken advantage of,
but when that subcontractor has these
coyotes, honest contractors can’t nearly
compete with that”
He pointed to several documents the
union had obtained that showed instances
where one man, a labor broker, had been
paid a flat fee for a job that would take
several men to complete.
“These contractors also work with people
who bring people across the border. There’s
a circle of how they’re connected,” Sheckler
said.
HAMMERED
Labor disputes and worker exploitation
in Portland’s building boom
not to talk to him, but he hands them his
card anyway and tells them to call him if
something happens.
“I am not going to expect a phone call
that day,” he said. “It may be a month. It
may be three months. You know when it’s
going to be? When the job gets completed
and they didn’t get paid.”
anchez is the heart and soul of the
union’s outreach efforts, his fellow union
members say.
That’s because for Sanchez, it’s personal.
“I was exploited,” he said.
When he immigrated to Portland from
Mexico in the late 1990s, he was flat broke,
alone and could speak only three words of
English: yes, no and please.
“I would point to the menu to order at
McDonalds,” he said.
He found a job hanging drywall in
residential housing projects, no application
needed. He was housed with other workers
new to the U.S. on property owned by his
new boss.
Six days a week, he’d hop into a van with
six to eight other men at 4:30 a.m. and
travel to a jobsite where he’d work into the
S
evening. He wasn’t given breaks, and his
employer deducted money from his
paychecks for everything from van insurance
and mileage to rent and the use of his tools
while on the job.
“At the end of the month, he’d give me
few 20s or 50s,” Sanchez said. It was always
less than $200. .
He said he “knows for a feet” Latino
workers continue to face this form of
exploitation in Portland’s curfent market.
It’s what motivates him to continue his
outreach.
When Sanchez was earning next to
nothing, his boss was paying him piece-rate,
meaning he was paid according to the
number of tasks completed rather than by
the hour.
It’s legal, so long as complete records are
kept showing the wages equate to Oregon’s
minimum wage or more per hour, said
Karen Clark, a spokesperson for Portland’s
U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour
Division.
She said piece-rate pay is common among
drywall and wood framing contractors.
“Employers still need to maintain records
of hours, but there’s a mentality that
because they are being paid piece rate, it
See WORKERS, page 5