By Eli Horowitz
On a Sunday evening in late September, Carlos Rodriguez Herrera unpacks a roll of posters in front of Manhattan Valley, a restaurant at the corner of 100th Street and Broadway.
One poster reads: “Wanted: Sweatshop Boss Phuman Singh and Lakhvir Singh owe their workers over $700,000 in unpaid wages over 8 years.”
The sign is part of a picket line that forms in front of the restaurant every Sunday at 5:30pm to protest unpaid wages. Herrera serves as a liaison between Justice Will Be Served, the organization running the campaign, and the current and former employees of Manhattan Valley.
The protestors’ mission is two-fold: to pressure the brothers Phuman and Lakhvir Singh to pay owed wages, and to inform the community about the Securing Wages Earned Against Theft (SWEAT) bill, a proposed state legislation that would make it easier for workers to collect stolen pay.
“We’re here to push for better enforcement,” said Herrera, referring to the SWEAT bill.
Wage theft is rampant in New York. From 2003 to 2013, at least $125 million in wages went unpaid, according to the Urban Justice Society, the Legal Aid Society, and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. This includes $101 million in wages the State Department of Labor failed to collect — 74 percent of which was owed to minimum wage workers — as well as $25 million in court-ordered pay for 62 cases that went to civil litigation.
Workers whose wages have been stolen often struggle to recover them, even after winning court judgments. Courts have few ways to make bosses pay workers, said Sarah Ahn, a representative from the coalition lobbying for the SWEAT bill.
“There’s no mechanism for them to collect,” she said.
Ahn said that when owners lose in civil litigation, they often claim they do not have the money to pay their workers. Meanwhile, many business owners continue to operate while the wages remain unpaid.
To combat employers who refuse to pay their workers, New York State Assemblymember Linda B. Rosenthal introduced the SWEAT bill in June 2013, which would provide three means for collection: one, allow workers to place a lien on businesses to prevent owners from changing the name of or selling the business; two, prohibit owners from freezing their assets or emptying their bank accounts; three, help workers collect wages from shareholders if the employer cannot pay. The bill passed the State Assembly and is expected to be voted on by the State Senate in 2017.
Although the SWEAT bill could help New York workers, neither presidential candidates Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump have proposed anything that would help curb this type of exploitation from the federal level, said Ahn.
“They both pay a lot of lip service to helping workers, but I haven’t heard any concrete addressing of the problems,” she said.
Clinton supports a federal $12 minimum wage, with certain cities and states going up to $15 based on the cost of living, according to her website. On the other side of the ticket, Trump said he supports a $10 federal minimum wage at a press conference on July 27th. However, he said he prefers states to make those decisions, as each state has different living expenses.
Even though both presidential candidates have supported raising the minimum wage, JoAnn Lum, an organizer for the National Mobilization Against Sweat Shops (NMASS), points out that this means little unless people have a means of collecting the wages in the first place.
“Unless the law strengthens, the government is actually a partner to sweat shop bosses,” said Lum. “It allows these scofflaw employers to get away.”
Trump himself has been accused of failing to pay contractors and employees minimum wage and overtime pay, according to a USA Today investigation published in June. The article noted that he has been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005.
In the case of Manhattan Valley, Herrera said workers filed a complaint with the State Department of Labor in 2008 because they were being underpaid. One of those workers, Efren Caballero, said he was paid $3 an hour, well short of the current $9 minimum wage in New York and the $7.65 minimum wage for tipped workers. Caballero said that when he and his co-workers asked the owners for their pay, the Singh brothers told them to bring their social security numbers and their papers or they would be fired.
After six years of trying to work with the New York State Department of Labor to get their money, Caballero said the workers sued the Singh brothers in 2014 and won a judgment of $700,000. Later that year, the brothers changed the name of the restaurant from Indus Valley to Manhattan Valley and refused to pay, according to the flier put out by the Justice Will Be Served campaign. The Singh brothers declined to comment.
Although the judge recently ordered Manhattan Valley to pay the workers $110,000, there is no guarantee the money will reach the workers’ hands.
Caballero and his fellow workers from the restaurant said they hope the SWEAT bill will make a difference for workers in the future.
“We want to pass legislation,” Caballero said in Spanish. “If not, a lot of owners are going to do the same thing.”
Rick McHugh, an attorney with the National Employment Law Project, said local and state government is largely responsible for labor enforcement, so the winner of November’s presidential election is unlikely to help workers recover wages.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a congressional initiative around wage theft,” he said.
Unlike larceny, which is prosecuted criminally, wage theft is typically addressed in civil courts. This means owners who fail to pay their workers do not go to jail. McHugh said no change in the law is needed to criminalize wage theft, but that it would require public resources and tax dollars to take on the cases.
“The police do not feel any pressure from wage earners or the larger community to prosecute that as a crime,” said McHugh. “But it is theft.”
If WSR would post a list of restaurants against whom workers have obtained judgments for unpaid wages — this is a form of neighborhood news — I for one would be happy to take my dining dollars elsewhere.
I’m sure some of the advocacy groups, or even Assemblymember Rosenthal’s office, could provide such a list.
Money judgments of that kind are public records and so there would be no violation of privacy in publishing that information to the community.
You wont be eating out anymore. Restaurants use illegals for deliveries, as cooks , busboys etc. They get paid cash and under minimum wage and labor laws are not respected. I thought this was common knowledge. People really aren’t aware that this has been happening for decades? Restaurants in Koreatown and Chinatown are notorious for this. If you eat out you are helping business owners exploit illegals.
Show me the court-ordered judgments (not just political “everyone knows” non-facts) and if it means not eating out to support the people, then that’s what I’ll do.
But “everyone knows” doesn’t do it for me. I’m one of “everyone”, and I *don’t* know. So show me.
What is not mentioned in all this we all know; many of these restaurant,construction and other workers being exploited are illegal immigrants.
Many do not report wage theft or other abuses because of the implied or explicit threat of being reported to immigration.
The other fly in ointment is no small number of these workers are paid off the books in cash. As such they likely are making more than they would if taxes and FICA were deducted.
Am not advocating wage theft or other abuses, just saying.