Day Laborers in NY Demand Back Wages for their Work and an End to Contractor Impunity

Andrés Garcia: (917) 340-6850; andres.nynice@gmail.com

Valeria Treves: (917) 324-3305; valeria.nynice@gmail.com

(español abajo)

Day Laborers Demanded Back Wages For Their Work

and an End to Contractor Impunity

Saturday, May 5, 2012

10:30 a.m.

38-01 Corporal Stone Street, Bayside, Queens, New York

This past Saturday, May 5^th, members of New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), a worker center in Jackson Heights, and their allies held a demonstration outside the office of Bongjun Park of Well-S Industrial Inc. to demand back wages and respect.  

         
          Park and his company were hired by Yong Jin Kim of Keystone Growth Corporation for a construction job at the Dwight School, an elite private school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Park owes over $90,000 in back wages and damages to eight immigrant workers who did grueling excavation work.

          With the legal assistance of the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center, workers have demanded unpaid wages from Park. Unfortunately, he has refused liability, claiming that the general contractor, Kim and Keystone Growth, did not pay him.

          “Day laborers are often hired by subcontractors, rather than by the contractor that has the contract with the property owner,” says Valeria Treves, Executive Director of NICE. “What develops is a chain of contracts, with employers robbing workers of their salaries and simply passing the buck on to someone else. The Park/Kim case, is a classic example of that”

          “Construction is one of several low-wage industries where multiple layers of subcontracting make it harder for employees to recover unpaid wages from the responsible employers,” said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, a staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project.  “Unscrupulous employers frequently hide behind subcontracting arrangements to argue that they are not the worker’s employer in an attempt to evade responsibility for basic wage and hour standards”.

          “Day laborers across the country are facing more and more instances where employers utilize subcontracting schemes to avoid paying their workers. Bongjun Park and other construction employers must hear this message loud and clear – day laborers will not be silent in the face of this exploitation,” says Nadia Marin Molina, Worker Rights Program Coordinator/ Staff Attorney at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

“It is a scandal that Mr. Park refuses to pay workers who worked for him,” says Andrés Garcia, Worker’s Rights Organizer at NICE. “If he hires someone, he has to pay them. That’s the law.”

          “We decided to stand up against Mr. Park because we know that he will just continue to do the same  to other workers after us. We want him to understand that we have rights as workers and that if he hires someone he must pay them and treat them with respect,” said Luis Alvarez, one of the eight workers who worked for Mr. Park.

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